One of the many, many, many reasons to fear for the safety of democracy in the United States is that there is something called a "constitutional sheriffs" movement, which continues not to be laughed out of existence despite all practitioners of the theory being absolute whackadoodles. The good news is that it's relatively small. The bad news is that, like every other conspiracy movement of the last few decades, it's now being folded into general-form Republicanism and, especially, the fascist wing of the party.
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The fascist think tank Claremont Institute, for example—the place that brought us the first attempted presidential coup in our nation's history—may currently be battling to restore its reputation after unleashing coup-plotter John Eastman on the country along with a host of fraudsters and the brazenly fascist Charlie Kirk, last year "launched a program to bring sheriffs to California for a week-long training on the Constitution and 'the Roots of Radical Leftist Ideology,'" The Washington Post just noted.
The New York Times now brings us a few photos and tidbits from this month's Las Vegas meetup of the so-called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, headed by the notorious crackpot Richard Mack. The group hosted the election conspiracy theory-promoting Mike MyPillow Lindell, the "True the Vote" conspiracy peddlers, and a gaggle of the "constitutional" sheriffs currently getting themselves in trouble in their home states for using the power of their offices to "investigate" the fraud conspiracy that they cannot find but are certain exists.
What's new here, then, is that while the theory of "constitutional sheriffs" has been around for a while, propped up by anti-federal-government screwballs in the western states who continue to be furious that they can't personally annex whatever federal lands and resources they want to lay claim on. It's now a movement that is partnering tightly with other anti-democracy and pro-fascist groups to gain a bit of authority. It's shifted focus to become a movement specifically centered around 2020 fraud hoaxes, and is becoming part and parcel of that same MyPillow crowd. But, you know, with their own armories.
The Times has some quotes from election officials and others who actually have to deal with these crackpots, along with speculation on where this may be going next, now that both some of the sheriffs and a lot of Republicans are mulling the use of deputies to "monitor" polling locations—a common tactic of the Jim Crow era. But as we watch this crackpot movement be steadily absorbed into what passes for mainstream Republicanism these days, here are a few things to keep in mind.
First, and I cannot emphasize this enough: This is a small movement of absolute crackpots with guns strapped to their hips. The entire premise of the constitutional sheriff "movement," as invented by Richard Mack and a bare handful of similar cranks, is that your county sheriff is the Ultimate Decider of American Law. Why? Because screw you, that's why. It's a theory based solely on a far-right need to deny federal government authority when it comes to (1) anything related to guns, or (2) most things related to cattle. After inhaling a lifetime of rangeland dust, this is the product those far-right brains produced.
The whole premise of the movement is that it is your local sheriff who decides what laws are and aren't constitutional. As a reminder, the United States’ three branches, which are co-equal, work like this: Congress can pass laws. The Executive Branch can write regulations. The Supreme Court can rule on the constitutionality of all of it.
And, under the “constitutional sheriff” theory, if your own local sheriff disagrees with any of that, they can just ... erase it, declaring that, Actually, the Constitution says something different in Itchy Sand County, because sheriffs and only sheriffs have the power to tell everyone else in the United States government to go to hell. It's a theory so absurd and meritless that it is best equated to the old "sovereign citizen" idea, which asserts that any random citizen of the country can declare themselves an independent country and therefore doesn't have to pay taxes or obey speed limits anymore.
It is bizarre. It is ridiculous. It's what you get when a sheriff decides they really liked the Bundy Ranch standoff—wherein a gaggle of local criminals organized an armed revolt against the federal workers tasked with evicting half-starved cattle from restricted federal rangeland—and thinks, “I should use my tiny morsel of public power to encourage other crooks to do this, too.” Richard Mack and the other adherents are laughable figures: incoherent bullshit artists obsessed with their own self-importance. For 10 years, this little movement got nowhere because even the rest of the American far-right was mostly embarrassed to be seen with them.
The "constitutional sheriff" movement is an offshoot of the far-right anti-government militia movement. It was founded from the start on not obeying gun laws handed down by the federal government. That's the "constitutional" question each of the sheriffs around the country who ally with the movement all focus on; there's nobody in the group obsessed with a supposedly "constitutional" right to build a meth lab or smuggle fentanyl across state lines. Doesn't happen.
Nope, it's just anti-government, gun-stockpiling, unregulated militia whackjobs with badges.
It's also a movement of sheriffs who are ... how are we going to put this. Not exceptionally bright? As one can imagine, these are people willing to reinterpret all of history and reality in order to come to the conclusion that Actually, sheriffs outrank the entire United States government. They are people with inventive imaginations and no particular tether to reality. These are the precise sorts of gullibles who are predisposed to other baseless, outlandish, and dangerous conspiracy theories, and it should be completely unsurprising that those who have associated themselves with far-right militia hokum also fell hook, line, and sinker for whatever fraud claims Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, or other hoax-promoters burped out on tv.
Italian satellites? Bamboo ballots? Sure. Once you've convinced yourself you're the decider of all laws, it only stands to reason that, uh, Italy would be using any means at their disposal to take that away from you.
But the other thing to remember about the new "constitutional sheriff" shift into election conspiracy theories rather than gun fetishes is that it's predictably racist. Yes, as stunning as this news is, we shall try to absorb it: It turns out that far-right conservative sheriffs might be a little bit racist. The reveal is in plain sight: All of these conspiracy theories are proposed by other racists to explain why the votes in not-conservative American cities should be treated as fraudulent, but all the votes for Trump in their own rural counties are surely legitimate.
"Some sheriffs from rural Trump-voting counties said they hadn’t observed major problems to fix in their own counties, but supported more sheriff involvement overall," reports the Times.
Hmm. Go on.
Ah. Areas where there are "allegations." And where are those areas? Well, the Trump team spelled that out pretty clearly in their various bullshit lawsuits. The areas with "allegations" are Democratic-voting cities in swing states, places like Detroit and Philadelphia. Cities with a lot of Black Democrats were deemed suspicious solely because they voted against Trump in very large numbers. If Trump's clan of hoax-inventors wanted to overturn the election results in those states, they needed to invent reasons to explain how those votes, specifically, were the "suspicious" ones.
Yeah, this is a whole lot of ick. But this little constitutional sheriff movement has evolved from a formerly mockable gaggle of gun-toting, pro-militia, office-holding weirdos to, well, the exact same thing—but now focused on promoting election hoaxes alongside Captain MyPillow and various fascism-promoting think tanks and activist groups.
It's like the QAnon movement: The Trump years have seen every group of far-right conspiracy-minded , conspiracy theorists, the professionally paranoid, the aspirationally paranoid—all of them have coalesced into one big ball of hostile delusion. The collapse of conservative ideology, after too many failures in a row, left the Republican base disillusioned and looking for enemies to blame. And, lo and behold, the enemies turned out to be absolutely everybody who isn't them.
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The fascist think tank Claremont Institute, for example—the place that brought us the first attempted presidential coup in our nation's history—may currently be battling to restore its reputation after unleashing coup-plotter John Eastman on the country along with a host of fraudsters and the brazenly fascist Charlie Kirk, last year "launched a program to bring sheriffs to California for a week-long training on the Constitution and 'the Roots of Radical Leftist Ideology,'" The Washington Post just noted.
The New York Times now brings us a few photos and tidbits from this month's Las Vegas meetup of the so-called Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, headed by the notorious crackpot Richard Mack. The group hosted the election conspiracy theory-promoting Mike MyPillow Lindell, the "True the Vote" conspiracy peddlers, and a gaggle of the "constitutional" sheriffs currently getting themselves in trouble in their home states for using the power of their offices to "investigate" the fraud conspiracy that they cannot find but are certain exists.
What's new here, then, is that while the theory of "constitutional sheriffs" has been around for a while, propped up by anti-federal-government screwballs in the western states who continue to be furious that they can't personally annex whatever federal lands and resources they want to lay claim on. It's now a movement that is partnering tightly with other anti-democracy and pro-fascist groups to gain a bit of authority. It's shifted focus to become a movement specifically centered around 2020 fraud hoaxes, and is becoming part and parcel of that same MyPillow crowd. But, you know, with their own armories.
The Times has some quotes from election officials and others who actually have to deal with these crackpots, along with speculation on where this may be going next, now that both some of the sheriffs and a lot of Republicans are mulling the use of deputies to "monitor" polling locations—a common tactic of the Jim Crow era. But as we watch this crackpot movement be steadily absorbed into what passes for mainstream Republicanism these days, here are a few things to keep in mind.
First, and I cannot emphasize this enough: This is a small movement of absolute crackpots with guns strapped to their hips. The entire premise of the constitutional sheriff "movement," as invented by Richard Mack and a bare handful of similar cranks, is that your county sheriff is the Ultimate Decider of American Law. Why? Because screw you, that's why. It's a theory based solely on a far-right need to deny federal government authority when it comes to (1) anything related to guns, or (2) most things related to cattle. After inhaling a lifetime of rangeland dust, this is the product those far-right brains produced.
The whole premise of the movement is that it is your local sheriff who decides what laws are and aren't constitutional. As a reminder, the United States’ three branches, which are co-equal, work like this: Congress can pass laws. The Executive Branch can write regulations. The Supreme Court can rule on the constitutionality of all of it.
And, under the “constitutional sheriff” theory, if your own local sheriff disagrees with any of that, they can just ... erase it, declaring that, Actually, the Constitution says something different in Itchy Sand County, because sheriffs and only sheriffs have the power to tell everyone else in the United States government to go to hell. It's a theory so absurd and meritless that it is best equated to the old "sovereign citizen" idea, which asserts that any random citizen of the country can declare themselves an independent country and therefore doesn't have to pay taxes or obey speed limits anymore.
It is bizarre. It is ridiculous. It's what you get when a sheriff decides they really liked the Bundy Ranch standoff—wherein a gaggle of local criminals organized an armed revolt against the federal workers tasked with evicting half-starved cattle from restricted federal rangeland—and thinks, “I should use my tiny morsel of public power to encourage other crooks to do this, too.” Richard Mack and the other adherents are laughable figures: incoherent bullshit artists obsessed with their own self-importance. For 10 years, this little movement got nowhere because even the rest of the American far-right was mostly embarrassed to be seen with them.
The "constitutional sheriff" movement is an offshoot of the far-right anti-government militia movement. It was founded from the start on not obeying gun laws handed down by the federal government. That's the "constitutional" question each of the sheriffs around the country who ally with the movement all focus on; there's nobody in the group obsessed with a supposedly "constitutional" right to build a meth lab or smuggle fentanyl across state lines. Doesn't happen.
Nope, it's just anti-government, gun-stockpiling, unregulated militia whackjobs with badges.
It's also a movement of sheriffs who are ... how are we going to put this. Not exceptionally bright? As one can imagine, these are people willing to reinterpret all of history and reality in order to come to the conclusion that Actually, sheriffs outrank the entire United States government. They are people with inventive imaginations and no particular tether to reality. These are the precise sorts of gullibles who are predisposed to other baseless, outlandish, and dangerous conspiracy theories, and it should be completely unsurprising that those who have associated themselves with far-right militia hokum also fell hook, line, and sinker for whatever fraud claims Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, or other hoax-promoters burped out on tv.
Italian satellites? Bamboo ballots? Sure. Once you've convinced yourself you're the decider of all laws, it only stands to reason that, uh, Italy would be using any means at their disposal to take that away from you.
But the other thing to remember about the new "constitutional sheriff" shift into election conspiracy theories rather than gun fetishes is that it's predictably racist. Yes, as stunning as this news is, we shall try to absorb it: It turns out that far-right conservative sheriffs might be a little bit racist. The reveal is in plain sight: All of these conspiracy theories are proposed by other racists to explain why the votes in not-conservative American cities should be treated as fraudulent, but all the votes for Trump in their own rural counties are surely legitimate.
"Some sheriffs from rural Trump-voting counties said they hadn’t observed major problems to fix in their own counties, but supported more sheriff involvement overall," reports the Times.
Hmm. Go on.
Ah. Areas where there are "allegations." And where are those areas? Well, the Trump team spelled that out pretty clearly in their various bullshit lawsuits. The areas with "allegations" are Democratic-voting cities in swing states, places like Detroit and Philadelphia. Cities with a lot of Black Democrats were deemed suspicious solely because they voted against Trump in very large numbers. If Trump's clan of hoax-inventors wanted to overturn the election results in those states, they needed to invent reasons to explain how those votes, specifically, were the "suspicious" ones.
Yeah, this is a whole lot of ick. But this little constitutional sheriff movement has evolved from a formerly mockable gaggle of gun-toting, pro-militia, office-holding weirdos to, well, the exact same thing—but now focused on promoting election hoaxes alongside Captain MyPillow and various fascism-promoting think tanks and activist groups.
It's like the QAnon movement: The Trump years have seen every group of far-right conspiracy-minded , conspiracy theorists, the professionally paranoid, the aspirationally paranoid—all of them have coalesced into one big ball of hostile delusion. The collapse of conservative ideology, after too many failures in a row, left the Republican base disillusioned and looking for enemies to blame. And, lo and behold, the enemies turned out to be absolutely everybody who isn't them.
We need democracy warriors to help people exercise their right to vote this November. Sign up to be a poll worker at Power the Polls.