House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy nods to parents calling “diversity, equity, and inclusion” Marxist programs The Majority Report crew discusses how there is no pushback to conservatives openly advocating to end anti-bullying programs after the critical race theory panic and passing of legislation such as the don’t say gay bill. The crew also talks about how parents are being activated to go to the polls by hateful right-wing rhetoric.
At the Texas Tribune event in Austin, Texas on Saturday afternoon, California Governor Gavin Newsom took aim at far-right Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his anti-freedom stances, which span from his treatment of asylum seekers, the banning of books, the rollback of reproductive rights and beyond. Francis Maxwell reports.
“We are out here to push back on things that society knows is wrong”. Wrong society has said that drag dressing up is fine and has for decades. It is only recently that the rabid republican elected office holders made it a sexual thing claiming it was orgies that kids were taken to. The religious leaders have decried it as sin and against the word of god and they jumped on the republican hate language. Dressing in drag has been done forever, from early theater to the advent of TV, to Flip Wilson in the 1970s to even Rudy Giuliani. It is done on Halloween and has been done in drag shows for as long as I can remember. It was done at schools. It is only the last year that these assholes that want everyone to live, act, and be just like they demand that everyone be some kind of fictionalized 1950s. But even in the 1950s you had drag. This is a made up outrage to try to force the minority view that the LGBTQ+ must be removed from society, that anyone who doesn’t follow a traditional male / female role must be removed from society, and any religion not approved by this minority must be removed from society. These groups at the US Taliban. The Proud Boys and Patriot Front are the Nazi loving brownshirt enforcers of the curreent rabid republican party. Hugs
A Drag Bingo night at a Katy Church stirred up controversy on Saturday evening. The event, meant to raise money for the church’s clothing boutique for trans-youth, sparked heated demonstrations.
KPRC 2′s cameras were rolling as demonstrators clashed outside the First Christian Church on Morton Ranch Road. A number of groups were there supporting the LGBTQ+ community and other groups against the event said they wanted to make sure their voices were heard.
“We are out here to push back on things that society knows is wrong. They are having an event, welcoming children to drag queen bingo hour. This is unacceptable,” Founder of Urban Conservatives of America Jonathan McCullough said.
“That is nonsense, because drag in itself is just a costume,” said one person supporting the event. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”
Heavily armed officers formed a line in the median in an effort to keep the two sides separate. As the crowds grew bigger and bigger, more officers arrived. Despite the chaos, a pastor told KHOU 11 the event was a sold-out success.
“We know that not everyone will agree with us, so we create a place for people to feel welcomed and understand there will always be people who don’t agree with us,” the pastor said.
Under the blazing sun outside, the scene at First Christian Church in Katy felt chaotic– and angry. More than 100 people traded insults for hours with counter-protesters. Some on both sides hid their faces. Some on both sides displayed big guns. https://t.co/7Ho3djT9id
Proud Boys and Kelly Neidert’s Protect Texas Kids are in Katy, Texas, protesting a drag bingo fundraiser at First Christian Church. PB and Houston antifascists just clashed. Heavy police presence dividing the two groups now pic.twitter.com/5p4EgD88mT
The group of Nazis appear to be leaving the protest, sporting for the first time today a flag with a swastika. Proud Boys and Patriot Front have also left pic.twitter.com/hJFBhgPAC6
I’m glad no one was hurt, and I’m glad they didn’t cancel the event, or back down.
Grown-ass men getting their undies bunched because they don’t like someone else’s wardrobe, and they think that entitles them to threaten violence. If there’s a better definition of toxic masculinity, I can’t think of it.
How can they even breathe in those masks? I mean, haven’t they seen the studies that show that masks reduce oxygen in the body. I am really concerned for their health.
Must be some kind of really boring life when all one does is search the internet for drag queen events that can be harrassed. I guess since all the abortion clinics were closed, there’s nothing else to entertain the nazis
I hope someone had a sign “Americans defeated Nazis once, we can do it again.” With some American flags on it. Why can’t liberals use the American flag too? We want America to be a great place to live for everyone. (Well, except Nazis)
Didn’t some right wing nut write a book about how the Nazi were really all gay? Should make a sign promoting that book. (I was going to say to hand out copies of the book, but that would be supporting the author.)
They are just trying to make their numbers much higher than those numbers are and pretend they are not just uneducated rural militia folks. I always ask crazy “conservatives” in central Ohio where their parents and/or grandparents were born.
“Sparked heated demonstrations … other groups against the event said they wanted to make sure their voices were heard“
One of the reasons we’re hurtling toward theocratic fascism in this country is because the media keep describing what’s happening with sanitizing, normalizing language like this.
Have they tried praying? They claim that prayer can solve any problem, but when they actually care about something they show up. Dead kids in school,? Nothing but prayer. Kids at a show? Threats and intimidation. They need to actually act like they believe their own religious bullshit on occasion.
If you are going to events, probably a good idea to bring something like pepper spray to defend yourself if these knuckledraggers show up. They have been given permission to act like this by the GQP.
“That is nonsense, because drag in itself is just a costume,” said one person supporting the event. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”
One might also suggest proud boy and oath keepers drag as costumes.
Several years ago religious bigots got into the highest levels of the school education system in the state of Texas. I remember posting of Aron Ra and others going to testify against the rewriting of the textbooks to bring history, biology, and other subjects in line with the bible as much as possible. Including the stressing that the US was established as a Christian nation under Christian policies and that the constitution was given to the founding fathers by Moses. Then recently it was to get rid of any negative connotations of slavery and the horrors of that institution to calling slaves unwilling immigrants and unpaid workers. The drive was fueled by that CRT which is a advanced degree course taught in law schools was being taught to little kids and that white kids were being made to feel bad about being white. Then it became the drive to remove anything LGBTQ+ from schools. Don’t say gay bills. And now we are up to a total rewrite of history to prove how great and exceptionally honorable Texas is, just as god intended it to be. Hugs
The Texas Tribune reviewed the 15-page document, which will be handed out to new drivers, and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly it chronicles the state’s history.
The 1836 Project, an advisory committee created by the Texas Legislature last year to promote “patriotic education” about the state’s history, approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will be shared with Texans when they get a new driver’s license. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
A committee charged with producing a “patriotic” telling of Texas history approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will now be distributed to new Texas drivers.
The advisory committee — named the 1836 Project after the year Texas gained its independence from Mexico — was created last year with the passing of House Bill 2497. The legislation required the committee to tell a story of “a legacy of economic prosperity” and the “abundant opportunities for businesses and families, among other requirements.”
“We must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when he signed the bill. Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, later selected a nine-member, largely conservative group to head the 1836 Project.
The creation of the committee was largely a conservative backlash to The New York Times’ publication of “The 1619 Project,” which was named after the year enslaved people first arrived on American soil and aimed to center slavery in conversations about U.S. history. The pamphlet, which will be distributed at driver’s license offices, comes at a time when the state is increasingly trying to regulate how race, sexuality and history are taught in public schools.
The Texas Tribune reviewed the 1836 Project committee’s final pamphlet and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly the document chronicles the state’s history.
The historians acknowledged that the committee had a difficult assignment; Donald Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, called squeezing the entirety of the state’s history into little more than a dozen pages a “herculean task.”
But the historians also noted that condensing the state’s history and painting it in a mostly celebratory light came at a cost. The pamphlet, they said, fails to fully hold institutions accountable for slavery and other forms of oppression and shortchanged Indigenous Texans, Tejanos, Black Texans and women.
The pamphlet engages with contemporary research — like literature about the lasting impact of the Confederacy — but also tries to fulfill state lawmakers’ wish to promote “patriotic education” and avoid disturbing Texas’ myths, said Raúl A. Ramos, a history professor at the University of Houston.
“The traditional mythic version of Texas history, it’s about the heroes of the Alamo having pure intentions of liberty and freedom in the abstract rather than the liberty to conquer Indigenous and Mexican lands and freedom to own enslaved people,” Ramos said. “It’s that abstract idea that is attractive and powerful and [that’s what] people gravitate towards, and I think that’s what people associate with patriotism.”
Below is a look at how the Project 1836 advisory committee’s pamphlet discusses four areas of Texas’ history — early settlements, the oil and cotton industries, the Alamo and slavery — and the historians’ notes on what the document’s authors chose to play up, play down or omit.
Early settlements
Trinidad Gonzalez, a history professor at South Texas College, said the pamphlet aggrandizes Manifest Destiny, the belief that American settlers had the God-given right to expand across North America. It’s an idea about early settlements that was driven by 19th century nationalism and exceptionalism.
In the opening paragraph, the pamphlet says the land of Texas seemed like “an inhospitable zone to many,” but Americans “with fortitude and nerve” saw the opportunities and made the region productive.
“It wasn’t just the Americans who thought it was boundless opportunities. [The pamphlet’s authors] are trying to create the simplified Manifest Destiny story that fits this older myth of white Americans coming in and basically building Texas,” Gonzalez said. “And when you do that, then you silence everybody else that participated in the history of Texas.”
Historians told the Tribune that the pamphlet glosses over the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican populations that resided before, saying Texas was “nearly depopulated” before American settlers migrated to the land.
However, the Indigenous population significantly outnumbered American settlers in 1836, Gonzalez said. The stretch of land from the Rio Grande Valley to Laredo was also once one of the most economically successful Spanish settlements, he added.
Emilio Zamora, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called the pamphlet’s interpretation of early settlements in Texas “very unsettling.”
The document “speaks very negatively about the Mexicans and the colonial settlers that preceded them,” Zamora said.
Oil, not cotton
When it comes to the state’s economy, the pamphlet zeros in on the oil industry. The discovery of oil “ushered in a period of remarkable transformation,” the pamphlet says. It characterizes the wildcatter and oil derrick as “Texas icons.”
Nowadays, West Texas’ Permian Basin is the nation’s most productive oil region. The Permian produces more than 5 million barrels of the nation’s daily output of 11.6 million barrels of oil per day.
But before oil, there was cotton. Texas still leads the nation in cotton production. Cotton continues to be the state’s largest agricultural export and is responsible for thousands of jobs across sectors, such as ginning companies, warehouses and oil mill processing plants.
The 1836 Project pamphlet mentions oil five times. It never mentions cotton.
The pamphlet highlights Houston’s title as “energy capital of the world,” but cotton used to be so essential to the city that it would celebrate the crop with festivals, naming a symbolic leader for the carnival King Nottoc (“cotton” spelled backwards).
The pamphlet “ignores the reality that cotton production and poverty long characterized much of the Texas economy after the Civil War and through 1940. Instead it glamorizes the oil industry,” said Walter Buenger, a history professor at UT-Austin.
Buenger said that the state’s dependence on cotton made Texas one of the poorest states in the country.
The cotton market had globalized and become increasingly competitive, but the state delayed mechanizing cotton production to continue offering low-skilled jobs that had low returns. It resulted in an unequal distribution of income: While a handful of cotton traders got “fabulously wealthy,” most Texans struggled to survive, Buenger said.
“Through 1940, Texas was, for the most part, very poor. And they were poor because they were wrapped up in this cotton production business,” Buenger explained.
The Alamo
The Alamo, the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century in what is now San Antonio, has long been enshrined as “the cradle of Texas liberty.” The men who died as Mexican troops laid siege on the Alamo are often remembered as heroic martyrs who valued liberty over their lives.
“Only Texas could turn defeat into a legend — and a song, and a tourist attraction, and a major motion picture,” author Rosemary Kent famously said of the Alamo.
But the 1836 Project pamphlet does not dwell on the Alamo. Of the document’s 4,517 words, just 87 are spent on the siege.
Gene Preuss, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown, called that a notable move away from traditionalist history in a state where the Alamo has often been at the center of Texas politics and history.
“There really isn’t much discussion of the Alamo in the pamphlet,” he said. “And I find that interesting because a lot of traditional histories would focus on the Alamo.”
In fitting the Battle of the Alamo into one abridged paragraph, the pamphlet’s authors appear to acknowledge the recent efforts to reexamine the historic event.
“For a long time, Texas history has been taught from one perspective,” Preuss said. “I think [the pamphlet] does enough to open some cracks, which I as a professor can open further for my students so that when they come into class, they don’t say things like ‘I didn’t know [Black Texans] participated in the Texas revolution’ [or] ‘I didn’t know Tejanos were on the side of Texians and died at the Alamo.’”
But the pamphlet also avoids going into that reexamination. It doesn’t mention, for instance, the issues brought up in the book “Forget the Alamo,” which was published last year and prompted the lieutenant governor to push for the cancellation of an event featuring the title at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The book highlights how the defense of slavery played a key role in the conflict with Mexico and questions the garrison defenders’ military strategy.
Slavery
When the 1836 Project committee was established, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project,” feared that the 1836 Project was another attempt to veil the nation’s history of slavery.
“When it comes to slavery, some people have never wanted open debate and honesty. They seek to bury and prohibit instead,” Hannah-Jones said on Twitter.
The pamphlet does mention slavery, acknowledging that it became an economic engine for the state. Republican lawmakers also required that the document mention how on June 19, 1865, the date that became the basis for Juneteenth, Union soldiers in Galveston announced the liberation of all enslaved people.
“We wanted to reemphasize and make dang true that everybody understands that slavery was a bad thing and Texas participated,” Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, said at the August committee meeting.
But many of the historians the Tribune spoke with said the pamphlet doesn’t go far enough, noting that it omits how central defending slavery was in the Texas war of secession from Mexico and the Civil War. They say it airbrushes gruesome accounts of how enslaved people were treated.
“Slavery is mentioned only as a complication that delayed annexation by the United States. The pamphlet never names any enslaved individuals, nor does it describe their fight for freedom,” historians Leah LaGrone and Michael Phillips wrote in a Texas Monthly column.
Ramos, the history professor at the University of Houston, said the pamphlet’s treatment of slavery is an example of how the document takes a passive, ambiguous approach to inequity and oppression that doesn’t hold Americans who participated in institutions accountable.
The pamphlet, he said, is a document birthed out of a political process and should be read as such.
“Sometimes people interpret history as being political, as being a way people might signal their politics,” Ramos said. “But it’s also political in that way that is part of how we view ourselves as people, as a community, and how we continue to either build community or divide community.”
Disclosure: Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston and the University of Houston-Downtown have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Bexar Sheriff Javier Salazar says there is an open investigation of Venezuelan migrants lured under false pretenses and displaced from San Antonio to Florida and then Martha’s Vineyard. The Majority Report crew discusses how the Venezuelan migrants were in the United States legally with court dates and promised expedited work papers. The MR crew questions the funding behind this political stunt and if it could possibly be Right-wing money as Florida Governor DeSantis’ office staff is involved.
Governor Ron DeSantis is confronted by a journalist about the state of Florida’s plans to spend tax money to displace migrants from Texas to Delaware. The Majority Report crew discusses how DeSantis wants to address people “trickling in” from border states to Florida by displacing them at the source. The MR crew talks about how asylum seekers are here legally though not citizens, and questions the usage of the word ‘legal’ when referring to people. The crew also mentions how DeSantis may be burning out quickly as campaigning for the 2024 election is still far out and questions DeSantis’ use of the ‘ultimate solution’ with regard to immigration.
“So this is how it works. You’re injected with graphene oxide. Once injected with the so-called vaccine, you become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence.
“And maybe 5G. Why are they putting 5G everywhere? It’s like the Tower of Babel. And how did God deal with the Tower of Babel? How much longer do you think he’s going to tolerate this satanic plan?
“This is trans-humanism. The internet of things. How would you like to be connected so that your thinking would no longer be your thinking, but it would be non-biological?
“The real question is who will control the computer that give you the messages? It won’t be your pastor.” – Anti-LGBTQ activist and supplements peddler Steven Hotze, speaking to a group calling themselves “Liberty Pastors.”
Hotze last appeared on JMG in August 2022 when he won a Texas ruling that may imperil insurance coverage for PrEP medications nationwide.
In April 2022, Hotze was charged with two felonies related to a bizarre 2020 “voter fraud search” incident. That case remains pending.
Hotze also appeared on JMG in 2020 when he left a voice mail for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, telling him to “shoot to kill” Black Lives Matter activists.
You may recall that Steven Hotze has compared gays to “communist termites” eating away at America’s moral fabric. He is also fond of declaring that it’s now a hate crime to denounce homosexuality.
It was Hotze who bankrolled the successful campaign to repeal Houston’s “wicked, evil, Satanic” LGBT rights ordinance, during which he compared gays to rapists and murderers.
According to Hotze, same-sex marriage will result in children “practicing sodomy” in kindergarten.
In 2017, he appeared here when he “prophesied” that God will deliver “just retribution” to lawmakers who vote for LGBTQ rights.
When he’s not calling on God to kill politicians or for the governor to kill Black Lives Matter activists, Hotze sells “miracle” supplements because high cholesterol doesn’t really cause heart disease.
Hotze regularly quotes QAnon slogans.
Watch the clip. There are slides!
Steven Hotze, a Texas-based religious-right activist and doctor, says that those who have received COVID-19 vaccines "become connected to the internet of things and you can be mind-controlled by artificial intelligence through maybe 5G." pic.twitter.com/BjpBqbPqja
ANd here I thought my cell reception was better becasue AT&T built a new tower a few blocks away. Noow we know that it is all part of the plan to control people, and we’re [aying for it through our cell phone bills.
The easiest solution for conservatives would be to turn off their cell phones, and disconnect their home internet completely.
As a person who actually works on this stuff, he’s so appallingly stupid that it boggles the mind. 5G is a problem but 4G wasn’t? And you know what the “Internet of Things” is? Any device that connects to the Internet and sends or receives data over it. The reason why they call it that is because those things might not be what we typically think of as “computers”. Your oven could be an ioT device because you could start it preheating while you’re on the way home. Your clothes dryer might be able to send performance data over the net and notify you if it needs service.
Just wait until he discovers what a “personal cloud” is… and no, it’s not a fart or BO. It’s when the various IoT devices on your body work in conjunction with each other to assist you. Your phone working with your watch and wireless headphones is a personal cloud. And as we move forward, more things that are on or in you will become part of your personal cloud. Hearing aids, contact lenses, implants in your body that monitor blood chemistry, etc… You think they’ve lost their shit now, just wait til they decide this is the “mark of the beast” they ramble on about.
Well, let’s see, according to your laughably puerile book of fairy tales, god made everybody speak a different language so that they couldn’t talk to each other to build the tower to heaven.
Then, humans developed new universal languages called “mathematics” and “science,” which allowed them to build the tower, where we discovered there’s no such dumbass thing as heaven.
Nan sent this to me and it is a grand breakdown of how DeathSantis not only broke the law but was trying to use human suffering as a political hate tool. This is a clear case of racism and bigotry. Thank you, Nan, for the link. Hugs
I’m against trafficking of migrants.
But luring unsuspecting people onto planes with lies about jobs, housing, and education awaiting them, and then depositing them onto an island off the coast of Massachusetts that’s totally unprepared to receive them, is a form of human trafficking.
The people you’re talking about aren’t American citizens. They have no rights.
Even if they’re not Americans, U.S. law prohibits kidnapping people and moving them across state lines.
I didn’t kidnap them. They’re here illegally!
You don’t know that. Under our laws, these people are entitled to a hearing on whether they’re here legally— just like all the Cuban asylum seekers who for years have arrived in South Florida fleeing communism.
What I’m doing is appropriate and legal! I’m paying for part of it with funds from last year’s American Rescue Plan.
That money was for the COVID-19 health crisis. It isn’t a slush fund for whatever political stunt you dream up.
I’m also using every penny of the $12 million Florida budgeted to relocate migrants. I have a responsibility to the people of Florida to send migrants out of the state!
If you’re responsible for Floridians, why are you picking up people in Texas and transporting them to Massachusetts?
Many of the people who cross the southern border into Texas end up in Florida.
But the law gives federal officials the responsibility for handling immigration, not you.
You don’t know the Constitution. Article 10 gives powers not delegated to the federal government to the States.
No Governor, you don’t know the Constitution. Article 1 gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states. Neither you nor the state of Florida has the authority to off-load people you don’t want onto other states.
I’m not the only governor doing this!
I know. On Thursday Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent two surprise buses of migrants to Washington, D.C., where they were dropped off near the residence of Vice President Harris carrying all they have in clear plastic trash bags.
And we red-state governors are going to do a lot more!
So Republican governors can’t be bothered with pesky things like laws or the Constitution?
The U.S. immigration and asylum systems are totally broken!
Then why don’t you support fixing them instead of using immigrants as political fodder? Ask Republicans in Congress to stop blocking federal legislation creating paths to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants and to expedite asylum seekers and other legal immigrants.
You don’t understand politics. You have to play hardball.
You don’t understand morality or decency. You’re treating immigrants as if they’re political pawns rather than people. They’re no less people than was your maternal great-great-grandfather Salvatore Storti, who immigrated to the United States from Italy in 1904, or your great-great-grandmother Luigia Colucci, who joined Salvatore in the United States in 1917.
Keep them out of this.
And you’re treating the citizens of blue states as political hostages rather than fellow Americans. But they are no less American than the millions of retirees from blue states who have migrated to Florida, and their children and grandchildren who still live in blue states. We’re all in this together.
No we’re not.
And you’re acting as if governing is a child’s game rather than a pursuit of the common good. But it’s not a game. Our common good has depended on the sacrifices of generations of American service men and women, first responders, teachers, social workers, and public leaders who dedicated their lives to this nation.
I don’t have to listen to your speeches.
Look, I get it: Coping with immigration is difficult. It requires hard thought and hard work.
You betcha.
But you’re giving it neither.
Interview over!
I’m told you have presidential ambitions, Governor. If so, you might start acting like a statesman rather than doing stunts that make you a cynical clown.
Wow super dangerous movement to end legal rights, law and order, and eventually democracy. The part that talks about a two-class country, those to be policed brutally and fully compared to the other class which is those above the laws is already here in a lot of police forces. This is really worth the read, it is scary, and it is coming to your area very soon if not already there. Sheriffs that think they are the supreme authority of the law, accountable to no one. Sort of like they have small kingdoms under the umbrella of King trump who these sheriffs support. Hugs
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.”
Some of the sheriffs brought their wives along; they also were awarded a $1,500 honorarium. (According to emails from his office, Bianco turned down the honorarium.) Upon accepting program invitations, sheriffs received a box of books as well as a nearly 300-page packet of readings, largely by Claremont scholars. “Do not be alarmed by the amount of reading,” an email from the organizer warned.
The first day was focused on policing and heavily featured the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, a lawyer who has written dozens of articles arguing that law enforcement in America does not have an implicit or explicit racism problem. The supplemental readings for this section included articles and books by Mac Donald with titles like War on Cops, The Diversity Delusion, “The Myth of Systemic Police Racism,” and “Black Lies Matter.” One assigned reading included Mac Donald’s argument that Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd may not have been “a product of racial animus at all,” but rather was possibly due to “poor training and an unfit temperament.” In a different article on Chauvin’s murder conviction—one that didn’t make it into the Claremont materials—Mac Donald argued that Chauvin may have been railroaded, and that his conviction meant that “it is an open question whether any police officer can receive a trial free from mob pressure, should he be prosecuted for use of lethal force.” This is the type of learning the sheriffs would have been likely to experience on Day One, and likely fits with many of their preexisting views. Attendee Sheriff Mike Lewis of Wicomico County, Maryland, has been a longtime outspoken critic of the Black Lives Matter movement and his biography is titled Sheriff Mike Lewis: Constitutional. Uncanceled. (“Sheriff Lewis is at the forefront of important initiatives protecting conservatism and the American way of life against defund the police, identity politics, and cancel culture,” reads the book description.)
Sheriff Brian Hieatt of Tazewell County, Virginia, later echoed Mac Donald when he wrote in a reflection on his time with Claremont scholars, “We are facing movements across our Nation to take away punishments and any disciplinary actions from people committing crimes.” (Hieatt’s department has imprinted the words “In God We Trust” on its official vehicles—Christian natural law, which dismantles the line between church and state, is a big part of both the “constitutional sheriff” movement and Claremont.)
Day Two involved a series of history lessons, including New York Times Magazine’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein’s essay about the 1619 Project, of which Claremont Institute scholars have been deeply critical. (Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay “America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One” was assigned as a supplemental reading.)
The day ended with a fireside chat with Kyle Shideler, a Claremont analyst who has focused his work on “terrorist groups.” It’s worth considering Shideler’s views on what does—and what does not—constitute a terrorist threat to understand what this lecture might have entailed. For years, Shideler has written that antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters are direct threats to the nation. By contrast, Shideler has written extensively and ferociously against laws to combat domestic terrorism. He has complained of the “FBI and Justice Department’s overzealous behavior in regards to January 6” prosecutions, calling the rioters and insurrectionists that day “trespassers,” and accused the DOJ of “persecuting J6 participants.” He’s called the Jan. 6 committee the “Russian Collusion Hoax 2.0,” criticized the “fanatics at DOJ prosecuting non-violent J6 protestors,” and claimed it was a “lie” to say Capitol police officers lost their lives as a result of the Jan. 6 attack. These are claims that were echoed by Sheriff Mark Lamb of Pinal County, Arizona, another attendee of the fellowship program, after Jan. 6, when he called the rioters “very loving, Christian people,” and demurred after being asked about the law enforcement officers killed and injured that day.
Recently, Shideler seemed to make an odd pivot to siding with the “defund the police” crowd he had spent years criticizing, calling for the FBI to be “abolished” and saying that “To save the rule of law, the bureau must be destroyed.” The reason for this call for radical abolition? The enforcement of a court-authorized search warrant at Mar-a-Lago over allegedly stolen classified documents, or as Shideler described it, a raid “over some boxes that another part of the government shipped to [former President Donald Trump].” (Opposition to the FBI is a core tenet of the constitutional sheriff movement, whose adherents believe that ultimate authority rests with the sheriffs, not federal law enforcement agencies.) The subject of Shideler’s chat to the fellows last year was “Antifa’s Threat to the Constitution.”
Day Three was focused on heady philosophical pursuits, while Day Four broadened the discussion to include various progressive movements and projects, largely, it seems, from the angle of learning about one’s enemy—or “countering the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary Left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda,” in Claremont-speak. This included sessions called “The Federalist vs. The Progressives” (Parts I and II), “Black Power & Identity Politics,” and “The Sexual Revolution & Feminism.” The last two sessions are notable in what they do include—strangely chopped-up readings from Stokely Carmichael on Black Power and Ibram X. Kendi on the idea of an anti-racist amendment—as well as what they do not: any feminist writers other than Betty Friedan. The only reading about LGBTQ issues was a 1971 manifesto from the Trans Liberation Newsletter, which raises the question of why sheriffs need some special knowledge of “transgender liberation” in order to do their police work in a way that treats everyone similarly. (Research has shown that trans people who interact with the police are much more likely to encounter violence than cisgender people, but it seems doubtful that this information was on the syllabus.) The day ended with a classic John Wayne Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Ultimately, the Claremont Sheriffs Fellowship is, at first blush, an unlikely union of the intellectual right and the populist right. But Claremont and its affiliates have long looked to figures like Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump to unite right-wing populism with their somewhat obsessive desire to defeat the perceived harms of liberals. Considering Claremont’s embrace of Trump and the Big Lie, the union feels like the appropriate sign of the times.
The intellectual far right also clearly sees the utility of an army of sheriffs who are able to put these ideals into practice. Prior to the last presidential election, the Claremont Institute’s 79 Days Report outlined how Donald Trump could take over the federal government by force, specifically naming county sheriffs as important to recruiting militia members and civilian posses to prevent “hostile crowds of outsiders” from protesting a MAGA takeover. Sheriffs appear willing to accept this mantle. In a reflection on the fellowship, Sheriff Cole wrote: “I never saw this day coming to America. A time when Sheriffs are placed in a position to stand in the gap between citizens’ rights and a government that seems to reach further and further over that line. Sheriffs must have a knowledge of where that line is and how to address the overreach with confidence.” He then credited Claremont with giving him the “Constitutional based knowledge” he needed to make these decisions.
This leads to another important point: Sheriffs are the perfect messenger for Claremont. They have a great deal of authority thanks to the overfunding of police in this country. They can use tanks, helicopters, SWAT teams, battering rams, surveillance technology, and, of course, guns to subdue and terrify community members. Because they are elected, they are in a better position to defy state and federal authorities, who have little oversight and cannot remove a sheriff from office even if they are a member of a militia group like the Oath Keepers. Perhaps most insidiously of all, because the left has paid so little attention to sheriffs and the largely rural areas where they have the most power, sheriffs have been allowed to spread their extremist beliefs with the imprimatur of gun and badge.
In the wake of Trump’s election lies, sheriffs are demanding more leeway to surveil ballot boxes and have encouraged vote vigilantes to snitch on their neighbors regarding alleged-but-never-proven “voter fraud.” Unlike the brains behind Claremont, sheriffs who are currently serving can act independently from other elected officials to fight this nonexistent fraud with the force of an army and relative impunity. Now, thanks to the Claremont Institute, they can justify such violent and anti-democratic schemes with the patina of intellectual firepower.
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