EDITORIAL:

Desperate for electoral victory, extremists craft insurgent strategy

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John Locher / AP

Members of the Proud Boys cheer on stage as they and other right-wing demonstrators rally, Saturday, Sept. 26, 2020, in Portland, Ore.

Sun, Nov 14, 2021 (2 a.m.)

Imagine the 2024 presidential election has ended in much the same way as the 2020 vote, triggering efforts by Republicans in several states to overturn outcomes based on false claims of widespread voter fraud. But this time, GOP sheriffs of those states begin deputizing civilian posses loaded with volunteers from the Proud Boys and other violent groups as muscle for the cause.

This isn’t dystopian fiction. It’s an idea dreamed up by the Claremont Institute, a far-right think tank, during a war-games exercise it conducted to imagine the aftermath of the 2020 election.

And now Claremont may be working to make the vision of sanctioned political shock troops a reality.

Its report, titled “79 Days to Inauguration,” reads like a how-to manual for extremist Republicans to succeed in 2024 where they failed last year. Written days before the 2020 election and assuming a Biden win, it’s presented as an academic exercise but seems designed to give supporters of Donald Trump ideas on how to silence or remove anyone standing in his way and return him to office, such as sheriffs deputizing “volunteers from Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers and other Posse Comitatus groups” to attack the opposition under the guise of protecting communities against civil unrest.

What a nightmarish thought: armed white nationalists roaming the streets, dealing out punishment to anyone perceived as a threat to their cause, and doing it with legal authority. It’s a modern, Americanized version of the terror caused by Nazis’ paramilitary Brownshirts.

What’s more, the Claremont Institute is holding what it calls a Sheriffs Fellowship program this week in California, which, combined with the “79 Days” report, raises a disturbing possibility. Is the so-called fellowship an opportunity to promote the idea of recruiting and deputizing street gangs to enforce right-wing political will?

Certainly, the idea of sheriffs having overarching power in their jurisdictions isn’t anything new. It’s a central tenet in the anti-government sovereign citizen movement that county sheriffs, not the federal or state government, wield ultimate authority. Followers of that movement don’t recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. government or state governments.

Now, however, this dangerous idea has spread outside of the likes of the Bundy clan and the militia groups that support him.

We see it in the movement to create so-called Second Amendment sanctuary counties, where sheriffs refuse to recognize or enforce responsible and reasonable gun safety laws that they deem overly restrictive.

There’s even a group known as the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association that travels around presenting seminars to sheriffs on how to defy the government — or “resist government overreach,” as they put it. As reported recently by the investigative news organization Mother Jones, the state of Texas recently sanctioned the group to provide officer training there, causing civil rights activists to sound alarms. Essentially there is a movement among radicalized sheriffs to not uphold the law as written by elected officials and validated by courts, but to determine on their own which laws will be upheld and even, by extension, inventing new laws. It is anti-constitutional to its core and a threat to the liberty of all Americans.

Now comes the Claremont Institute, which appears to be promoting the movement and taking the idea several notches with its notion of sheriffs teaming with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and other militia and white supremacist movements to create what amounts to paramilitary forces with the express purpose of undermining our way of life.

It’s an idea from dangerous minds. The Claremont Institute includes several prominent far-right extremists such as John Eastman, author of a legal argument advising Vice President Mike Pence to block certification of Joe Biden’s win. The war-games exercise regarding the election drew such participants as K.T. McFarland, a deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, and blogger Charles Haywood, who, as reported by The Bulwark, wants to see the nation led by a “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

Fortunately, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, a GOP candidate for Nevada governor, doesn’t subscribe to the idea of empowering the likes of the Proud Boys. Through a campaign spokesman, Lombardo said unequivocally that he would not consider organizing posses like those envisioned by Clarement, and was not attending its Sheriffs Fellowship.

That’s as it should be.

Claremont’s activities, on the other hand, offer a glowing-red warning sign about how far the extremist right is willing to go to destroy democracy and establish minority rule. We implore Americans to reject candidates who share these views.

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