Since the midterm elections I have been behaving myself — relatively speaking. No long-winded missives or rants for quite some time. But today I am about to break my streak. There is just too much going on to to remain silent.

For starters, there are the police who just murdered another black man, Tyre D. Nichols.

As a New York Times editorial argues, we have an obligation to view — to face — each one of these abuses of police power — the tortures, the beatings, the tasering, the gassing, the terrorizing of young black men like Mr. Nichols. Each day in America a dozen civilians are killed by police — double that if you factor in the asphyxiations and Taser deaths police inflict on disproportionately people of color.

It can’t go on this way.

We must also acknowledge the humanity, the love of their families, the talents, the potential, and the hopes of each of these victims. Nichols, who was just trying to get home when he was intercepted, dragged from his car, and murdered by a group of thugs with badges, died with his mother’s name on his lips and left behind a portfolio of lovely photography. How is his life any different from yours or mine?

We need to get up off our asses and finally do something to rein in police abuse. While a few people associated with an organization called BLM may have taken some wrong turns, let’s not ignore the point — that Black lives really do matter. Police abuses really are an epidemic and they put all of us at risk.

Sherrilyn Ifill, the former head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, wrote an excellent response to a piece in the Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf, who pronounced “Black Lives Matter” a dead letter and argued that public outrage wouldn’t fix bad policing and that, well, police killings are actually fewer than in the past. Ifill tore into Friedersdorf’s flabby and execrable arguments by pointing out that, first of all, the lack of public outrage and apathy is a white people problem. Moreover, Ifill argues, “Whatever modest reforms to policing have been adopted [following BLM pressure], were undertaken after long, pitched battles with those determined to maintain the status quo.” We saw it in the 100% Democratic Party controlled Massachusetts state legislature when the police lobby preserved Qualified Immunity — the license to kill without consequence.

With the murder of a Black man by five Black cops, many have finally realized that it is police training and police institutions which create bad cops — who just happen to police in racist fashion regardless of their own color. Compounding this is the fact that police are organized as paramilitary organizations where target practice is valued more than deescalation, where loyalty to fellow officers counts more than responsibility to the public. Police are truly a gang unto themselves. A few years ago a former California police officer spelled out exactly how the institution corrupts individuals. In his accounting, no cop can completely escape becoming an abuser.

Recent demonstrations over Cop City in Atlanta and the killing of a protester ought to also make us all think twice about America’s growing Police State. Over the strenuous objections of voters, the police lobby succeeded in getting approval for an 85 acre, $90 million (and growing) facility some have described as Fantasyland for cops. And a Police State also means that citizens must be convinced, ham-handedly if necessary, in the eternal good intentions and necessity of the police. We are constantly reminded, via well-placed Copaganda, that Officer Friendly is our pal. Particularly when he’s a “School Resource” officer.

In America everything is ultimately connected in some twisted way to race. In the case of Tyre Nichols’s murder, all five cops were Black. And in the case of Cop City, the City Council that approved the project is majority Black and the former mayor who pushed it is herself Black. Ex-mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is now working — just as ironic as it sounds — as “Senior Advisor for Public Engagement” in the Biden administration.

So how do we account for this? Is Bottoms a flaming racist? Is Biden a flaming white supremacist? Of course not, but the institutions they work in and through, and to which they have hitched their fortunes, are most definitely racist. Capitalism, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism — all have built and corrupted everything they touch. Our Constitution is the rulebook by which our institutions can stack the game against citizens. Racist laws, racist institutions, and racist justice operate by that rulebook have created a nightmare for some of us.

And a culture war is raging about teaching these truths.

We learned this week that the Sports Medicine Committee of the Florida High School Athletics Association wants to make mandatory the reporting of menstrual cycles by female student athletes. The same state — just in time for Black History Month — has also banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement course in AP African American Studies. In fact, Florida teachers now face felony charges if they use non-approved textbooks in their classrooms. You can view the AP African American History course framework here. The AP course consists of four principal units: Origins of the African Diaspora; Freedom, Enslavement, and Resistance; the Practice of Freedom (including a critical view of Reconstruction); and (most damning) Movements and Debates (including anti-colonial responses to slavery and the Civil Rights Movement). Somehow, Florida did not feel the need to ban AP European History which also covers philosophical and political debates. Just not Black ones.

What Florida Republicans have done is to edit out Blacks from American history in exactly the same manner that Nazis did in removing Jews from Germany’s civil service and its cultural institutions. Before they really got going.

Hitlerjugend (Hitler youth)

If you think Florida is an outlier, you would be wrong. Local school boards and librarians are under attack by town Republican committees all over the country. The Massachusetts ACLU points out that a very small minority of ultra-conservatives is responsible for all the noise. This may or may not be the case, as it has been my observation that much of this is the work of Republican Town Committees. Indeed, virtually every Republican in Congress mouths these same sentiments.

In the Tri-Town area [of SouthCoast Massachusetts] a couple of Republican hacks are trying hard to do their own impressions of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Joe Pires worries that Diversity and Equity committees are harming white students. Pires also doesn’t like library books that represent the identities and concerns of gay kids. Well, too damn bad! Schools and libraries are for all the children in a community — not just for kids whose parents look like Ozzie and Harriet.

Ozzie and Harriet was a television program in the 1950’s

Joining town Republicans like Pires with precisely the same views and similarly attacking marginalized members of society are neo-Nazis and Proud Boys who use physical intimidation as they did recently in Fall River. If attacks like these on gay and brown and black children and their families don’t concern you, they are precisely the same tactics the Hitlerjugend and Brownshirts used in Germany of the Thirties. As a famous German theologian famously observed, first they come for the “other”; then suddenly it’s you. Contact the SouthCoast LGBTQ+ Network if you want to help fight back.

After a quarter of a century of Tom Hodgson’s excesses going unpunished and no politician ever mounting much of a challenge, voters finally gave a pink slip to a sheriff who preferred playing the national stage to tending to his office back home.

Hodgson’s defeat represents the tireless efforts of regular citizens, church groups, and community organizations across Bristol County who had simply had enough of Hodgson’s intentional and egregious cruelty. Paul Heroux’s win over Hodgson rides on the wings of surprising electoral wins by Democrats across the country.

Heroux’s victory was not only a rejection of the incumbent and his carceral notions but an endorsement of professionalizing what has become a highly and dangerously politicized office. In Barnstable County voters similarly elected Donna Buckley, who like Heroux ran on a campaign of reducing recidivism and doing more to treat drug and mental health problems in jail.

Because Hodgson had placed himself squarely in the national spotlight, the Bristol County election took on national significance. Heroux, with a much smaller budget and an all-volunteer campaign team, amazingly beat an incumbent with a massive war chest, a slick media campaign, and a professional and unscrupulous campaign manager.

Hodgson’s campaign attempted to re-frame the tough-talking, gun-toting Western sheriff wannabe as a kind grandpa protecting Bristol County from rising crime, which he frequently attributed to “criminal aliens” and the “woke” criminal-loving Democrats who coddle them. Hodgson spared no effort to smear Heroux as a pedophile-loving Communist funded by Jews with a global agenda. His extraordinarily sleazy campaign may have done him in as much as a quarter century of abusing Bristol County’s sons and daughters.

In the end, all of Hodgson’s mendacity and cruelty caught up with him.

On October 31st Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson dropped another Willie Horton style campaign ad. He’d already tried to frighten voters by accusing his opponent of coddling pedophiles with a non-existent vote on non-existent legislation.

This time Hodgson’s target was George Soros — who Hodgson accused of coddling criminals, funding his opponent, and having the ultimate goal of destroying America: “They have their sights set on our way of life,” Hodgson warned with an ominous “they.”

The hate groups Hodgson works with — and on whose advisory board he sits — all hate Soros, a Hungarian Jewish philanthropist who was not involved in funding the anti-Hodgson campaign ads that have so irked the sheriff. Nope, it was Everytown for Gun Safety, the work of American Jewish philanthropist Michael Bloomberg, a frequent thorn in the side of NRA shills like Hodgson.

At first blush the sheriff, who already has a racism problem, didn’t seem to be able to keep his Jews straight.

But Hodgson’s “mistake” was intentional. Like his dishonest pedophile-coddling scare ad, this one was calculated to reach a certain constituency who watches Glen Beck (“Soros: The Puppet Master”) or Tucker Carlson (“Soros has decided to destroy the American justice system”) — a constituency whose political heroes returned recently from CPAC-Hungary, where autocratic Christian nationalist president Viktor Orban, shut down a university Soros founded and used the pandemic as a pretext for a power grab.

For today’s new crop of antisemites, George Soros has replaced a 19th Century j’accuse involving financier Nathan Rothschild which went on to become a 200-year conspiracy theory.

The sheriff’s antisemitic ad was promptly slammed by Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Deborah Goldberg, and other Massachusetts politicos. Hodgson’s Tweet also drew more than 60 comments, most negative: “Well if that isn’t the most antisemitic thing I’ve heard all day… Honestly Southeastern MA, he is the biggest embarrassment in the Commonwealth… Your mustache is too wide. You gotta trim it to just a little patch under your nose… Halloween’s over but maybe next year you can go full Nazi cosplay…”

Another commented: “These people no longer have dog whistles they have bull horns. It is no longer a silent wink wink it is full out public bigotry…”

In choosing George Soros — the wrong Jew, and he knew it! — Hodgson was trotting out time-worn antisemitic tropes, implying that “they” are unpatriotic and systematically destroying “our way of life” — which MAGA politicians themselves freely call white Christian nationalism. There’s really not much of a line between this and the Charlottesville tiki-torch neo-Nazis with their “Jews will not replace us.”

For years the Anti-Defamation League has tracked two organizations Hodgson is intimately involved with — the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The ADL’s factsheet “Mainstreaming Hate” describes one a as hate group and the other as an extremist organization. In 2018 the ADL published “The Antisemitism Lurking Behind George Soros Conspiracy Theories,” which explains why groups like FAIR and CIS are so obsessed with Soros. They routinely employ precisely the same dog whistles Hodgson used not-so-subtly in his antisemitic campaign ad: “They have their sights set on our way of life.”

In his defense, Hodgson tweeted that he couldn’t possibly be an antisemite because his parents are buried in a private crypt on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Yet antisemitism was no impediment to Hodgson’s father, “Sir John,” being buried in Israel. According to a memoir written by Hodgson’s youngest sister, their parents were given a private crypt in Israel because of “Sir John’s” services to the Vatican. The memoir recounts numerous examples of the father’s antisemitism. The elder Hodgson’s burial in a churchyard says everything about his connection to the Church and nothing about respect for Jews.

For years Hodgson has attended events sponsored by FAIR and its front groups, as well as an event called “Hold their Feet to the Fire,” where sheriffs and a variety of homophobes, Neo-confederates, Muslim-bashers, antisemites, and Christian Nationalists fill slots on right-wing talk radio programs. In 2016 Hodgson gave a talk at a FAIR national advisory meeting that preceded one by Ira Mehlman entitled “Soros Hacked: The Truth Behind His Big Money Network to Destroy U.S. Borders.”

Mehlman calls Soros’ Open Society Institute a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is white supremacist code for “Jewish” and FAIR and CIS have an axe to grind with Soros not only because he is a liberal philanthropist, but especially because he is a liberal Jew.

The American Jewish Committee has this to say about so-called “globalists”:

“Much like dual loyalty, Globalist is used to promote the antisemitic conspiracy that Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin, like the United States, but to some worldwide order–like a global economy or international political system–that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments, and media. […] Today, Globalist is a coded word for Jews who are seen as international elites conspiring to weaken or dismantle “Western” society using their international connections and control over big corporations (see New World Order)–all echoing the destructive theory that Jews hold greed and tribe above country.”

In 2001 Stephen Steinlight published a report for the Center for Immigration Studies — a group with which Hodgson has testified at Congress many times — entitled “The Jewish State in America’s Changing Demography.” Steinlight blasted secular Jews for their historical support for liberal immigration policies, arguing that Mexicans would soon erode Jewish political power. Steinlight said that his own views had been changed though dialogue with CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, a racist who once said “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough…”

In 2004 Steinlight ratcheted up his polemics with an essay, “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry,” but he still wasn’t making progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing leading Jewish organizations of censorship and repression.

In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s governmental affairs director and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to be the worst enemies of the country” — a sentiment that former president and Hodgson idol Donald Trump echoed on October 16th when he wrote, “Jews have to get their act together…”

Hodgson is so often found in cesspools with antisemites and racists that he can hardly smell the sewage. A case in point is Hodgson’s flirtation with Rick Wiles, a virulent antisemite and Christian nationalist who renounced his US citizenship because of marriage equality. Wiles broadcasts an “End Time” radio program that has featured Hodgson and received Trump White House press credentials.

Hodgson’s numerous and habitual problems with hate groups and bigotry are bad enough. But this is what he has chosen to do instead of competently running his jails and making a best effort to rehabilitate people.

Vote this embarrassment out of office on November 8th.

Choose Paul Heroux.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson must be feeling the stinging criticisms of his substandard jail food, his systematic violations of human rights, his suicides, his recidivism rate, and his refusal to help inmates deal with drug addiction.

After 24 years in office, only this week – barely a week before an election that could well unseat him – Hodgson announced to great fanfare that he had scored a “perfect score” on his opioid treatment program from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, joining his “perfect score” from the American Corrections Association.

ACA Certifications not worth the paper they’re printed on

Readers of this newsletter are aware that ACA certifications are not worth the paper they’re printed on. As Senator Elizabeth Warren found when investigating them:

“The ACA accreditation process is a rubber stamp. It is almost impossible for a facility to fail an ACA audit. The ACA grants facilities three months’ advance notice of audits; provides facilities with “technical assistance,” including “standards checklists” and an “audit readiness evaluation” that help a facility know when to schedule its audit and what to expect; and, at a facility’s request, will conduct a “mock audit” to help the facility prepare.4 If problems persist despite these ample opportunities to correct–or hide–them, the ACA Commissioners can ignore audit finding altogether and allow a facility that failed its audit to receive accreditation, rendering these standards toothless.”

Ditto, NCCHC certifications

It turns out that the NCCHC certifications are equally meaningless. A 2016 article in Prison Legal News showed that the NCCCH misrepresents the stringency of its “inspections.”

“Like the ACA, the NCCHC warns prison officials of upcoming inspections but claims they also conduct unannounced reviews. Also like the ACA, the NCCHC has historically relied on self-reported information from the facilities it accredits.”

Like the ACA, the NCCHC is an opaque organization with too many interests in private prison licensure, and it’s little more than a pay-to-play scheme:

“Both the ACA and NCCHC are also plagued by conflicts of interest, including the fact that they effectively sell accreditation to their correctional colleagues and promulgate their own voluntary standards with no oversight.”

As with the ACA, the NCCHC frequently gives “perfect scores” to institutions that habitually violate the constitutional rights of their inmates. But don’t believe me. Believe the Department of Justice:

“The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division issued a letter in April 2008 that found the Worcester County Jail and House of Correction in Massachusetts had unconstitutional conditions of confinement. Specifically, the jail failed to protect detainees from harm, failed to protect them “from exposure to unsanitary and unsafe environmental conditions,” and did not provide detainees with adequate mental health care. County officials rejected the allegations, noting the facility was accredited by both the ACA and NCCHC – which, in light of the DOJ’s findings, indicates the inadequacy of accreditation.”

The PLN article goes on to recount horror stories at the Idaho Correctional Center, where inmates were subjected to “gladiator school” beatings while corrections staff did nothing to intervene. It mentions the Walnut Grove Youth Correction facility in Mississippi where young people were sexually abused and subjected to high levels of violence. It mentions a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Texas where prisoners were given substandard medical care. It lists a number of mental health abuses at jails in Texas, Utah, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, and others – all where NCCHC certifications papered over the abuses, giving the institutions either “perfect” or passing scores.

In 2009 – only after the Department of Homeland Security had revoked Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio of his 287(g) program – did the NCCHC revoke Arpaio’s certifications that had previously given his facilities glowing reports. A facility that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp.”

Hodgson’s “First in the Nation” drug treatment program

In the same self-congratulatory press release announcing his NCCHC “perfect” score, Hodgson went a step further, announcing a drug treatment program in collaboration with Correctional Psychiatric Services (CPS), Hodgson’s healthcare vendor – a major donor to his campaign.

In another press release, Hodgson described his outpatient drug treatment program as the “brainchild” of CPS president Jorge Veliz and a “first-in-the-nation inmate reentry clinic.” Of course it is nothing of the sort. Hampden County Sheriff Nicholas Cocchi has been operating a similar program for four years in conjunction with the Department of Corrections – which ought to be running all county jails. Another Hodgson lie.

But why now?

One wonders why it took Hodgson 24 years – other than facing stiff campaign opposition – to take an interest in medically assisted [drug] treatment. In 2019 Hodgson fielded questions from community members at the last 287(g) hearing he ever conducted. In this clip Hodgson whines that administering MAT treatments to inmates is “controversial,” can take up to 10 minutes, and who has the time for that? Nope, all Hodgson’s going to do is give them a spritz of vivitrol and wish them good luck on the way out of jail.

CPS is part of the problem

Besides the recidivism and suicides, and the many reports of medical neglect, Hodgson’s jail leads in jail deaths. CPS has not only presided over the administration of substandard mental health services to inmates; since 2020 there has been clear evidence that it provides demonstrably bad medical care.

In October 2020 Reuters released a national comparison of jail deaths. Bristol County again was #1 on the wall of shame:

From Reuters data

Roughly one out of 500 detainees in the Bristol County Jail ends up dead compared to less than one per thousand in most other jails.

Dr. Jorge Raul Veliz, the owner and president and founder of Correctional Psychiatric Services, has a staff of about 200 and contracts with Dukes, Bristol, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth and Suffolk county jails in Massachusetts and has contracts in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine. His employees are not unionized. Veliz founded CPS in 1994, co-founded Boston Clinical Consulting (a Guatemalan healthcare company) in 2007, and in 2009 co-founded the Hospital Psiquiatrico Mederi in Guatemala.

In 2017 Barnstable County downsized its nursing staff, outsourcing care to Correctional Psychiatric Services. Within weeks, there were two suicides at the Barnstable County jail. Before CPS services even started work, Barnstable nurse Hillarie Gaynor Clarke penned a prescient warning of the risks of using CPS: “I strongly urge the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider CPS as an ally, based on its blatantly poor and sometimes fatal track record. Unfortunately, at this rate, it seems that inmate care will only worsen at our county correctional institution.”

CPS employees have been accused repeatedly of medical neglect by both local and ICE detainees. One report from a California-based immigration group details a case of medical neglect by CPS. A search of nursing licenses for the four caregivers mentioned in the complaint showed one with an Associate Degree in Nursing from Laboure College, another with an LPN from Lindsey Hopkins Technical College, another with a vocational certificate from Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School – all supervised by a Nurse Practitioner from the University of Louisville, who only saw the patient after the worst neglect had already occurred.

Click here for a longer profile of CPS, the detailed account of medical neglect by an ICE detainee which names CPS employees by name, a presentation on suicide by CPS principals Jorge Veliz and Beth Cheney, and the Reuters data.

Conflicts of Interest – “The Paid Jailer”

Besides CPS’s dismal record as a medical and mental health services provider, voters ought to be very skeptical of CPS’s involvement in Hodgson’s latest public relations con.

In January 2022 Common Cause released a report, “The Paid Jailer,” which looks at the role of campaign donations to sheriffs by their vendors. Not surprisingly, the report starts with the Bristol County sheriff:

“In Bristol County, Massachusetts, more than 30 people have died behind bars in the last 10 years. Overwhelmingly, these are people awaiting trial. Some have died because of substance withdrawal and others by suicide. And the people who remain incarcerated say that they’re not receiving basic health care, including one man in Bristol County who has given us permission to share his story anonymously…

Yet Thomas M. Hodgson, the longtime sheriff of Bristol County and the sole leader of the jail facility, has made no changes to the health care provider, CPS Healthcare. CPS has spent more than $20,365 on sheriffs’ campaigns in Massachusetts, and $12,040 has gone directly to Hodgson. The State of Massachusetts reports that state sheriffs paid a total of $9.82 million in contracts to CPS Healthcare from 2012 to 2021. Hodgson appears to be the rule, rather than the exception, which we show in The Paid Jailer: How Sheriff Campaign Dollars Shape Mass Incarceration…”

Final thoughts

Hodgson’s operation is a nightmare. For both inmates and taxpayers. On November 8th voters have a chance to replace death, neglect, starvation, lawsuits, and lies with a sheriff with experience in corrections who takes corrections seriously. Paul Heroux will reform and professionalize a cruel, corrupt, hyper-politicized, patronage-based operation with data-driven programs that actually rehabilitate incarcerated people.

And after all, that’s all Massachusetts sheriffs are supposed to do.

In Massachusetts, sheriffs and deputies are law enforcement officers with limited powers who may assist genuine police officers when requested. But they are not police officers. Sheriffs run jails, transport prisoners, serve eviction and other notices, and are prohibited from patrolling cities and towns — which are chartered (through state laws) to appoint and hire police officers with full police powers (a crucial point mentioned shortly). Sheriffs, however, do enjoy a few limited police-like powers; for example, while they are transporting prisoners through a foreign jurisdiction or when asked to assist in quelling a riot. And that’s about it.

But like Hershel Walker, Bristol County’s Sheriff Thomas Hodgson keeps trying to pass himself off as the police — and whenever Hodgson’s tried it, it’s either been unappreciated or he’s failed at it. Hodgson implies he has police powers by claiming to be tough on crime, but since he has very limited police-like powers all he can really do is suggest that women carry pepper spray, hand out swag to seniors at “safety” talks, lend out canines, and have his jail officers pose with children and his $250K “Homeland Security” command truck at parades.

It may seem like a trivial matter to Hodgson, but democracies require both the consent of the people to be governed — and to be policed. Only law enforcement officers elected or appointed by chartered Massachusetts municipalities have the police powers that Hodgson has repeatedly, and illegally, attempted to usurp.

But don’t expect to see Sheriff Hodgson show up when you call 911

In November 2003, Hodgson (without being asked, and even after being asked to stop) decided that New Bedford’s police force wasn’t doing a good-enough job. So he began sending his officers to patrol the city’s streets. The New Bedford Police Chief was not amused, nor the mayor, and neither was the District Attorney. The Standard-Times reported, “Bristol District Attorney Paul F. Walsh […] said Hodgson has made no effort to coordinate with city police and has a track record of legal failures when investigating crimes inside his own facilities. Walsh also said that arrests made by the sheriff’s deputies, who typically serve warrants and act as guards at the county jail, would be subject to challenges in court. ‘You can’t have the guy who was serving mashed potatoes to inmates last week calling himself a drug detective this week,’ Walsh said.”

But that’s exactly Hodgson’s shtick — playing cop — and he’s been doing it throughout his entire time in office.

Between 1991 and 2005 Peter Larkin was Hodgson’s “Detective Lieutenant of Internal Affairs.” Larkin resigned from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) three years after botching a drug investigation the BCSO undertook — again without “assistance from other police agencies.” One lawyer described the low quality of BCSO investigators, “They’re not trained for investigative work,” while another called the BCSO itself “a task force of goofballs who couldn’t cut it as real cops.”

ABC6 News reported in July 2020 that Larkin, who eventually found work as an attendance officer with the New Bedford Public Schools, had been fired (again) from that job for advocating lynching Black Lives Matter protesters: “I would roll tanks and bulldozers. Mush any human in the way. Shoot everyone else. Pile up the bodies and burn them on national tv.” Within days Larkin had to resign. This news was no surprise given Hodgson’s membership in a hate group and memberships in several extremist organizations.

On January 12, 2017 the state Supreme Judicial Court considered the legality of a sheriff calling himself a police officer, and drew a clear distinction between law enforcement officer and police officer in Commonwealth v. Gernrich where it concluded that “sheriff’s deputies are not police officers.”

The SJC had to consider the case of an inmate in the Worcester County jail who had lied to a deputy and was charged with violating G. L. c. 269, § 13A, which reads, “Whoever intentionally and knowingly makes or causes to be made a false report of a crime to police officers shall be punished by…” The inmate disputed that the deputy he had lied to was a police officer, so the matter before the SJC was the “issue whether a deputy sheriff is a police officer within the meaning of G. L. c. 269, § 13A, present[ing] a question of statutory interpretation…” The Justices reviewed Massachusetts law and concluded:

“For the reasons explained above, a deputy sheriff is not a ‘police officer’ for purposes of G. L. c. 269, § 13A. Thus, we reverse the defendant’s conviction, and a judgment of not guilty shall enter.”

The reasoning behind the ruling is critical. The Justices wrote that G. L. c. 41, § 98 defines “unique” police powers that other law enforcement officials lack; therefore only police can be called police:

Although the term “police officer” appears in a variety of statutory contexts, we adopt the definition in G. L. c. 41, § 98, to guide our analysis of the issue. General Laws c. 41, § 98, which authorizes the appointment of “police officers” for cities and towns, is an appropriate guide for the interpretation of G. L. c. 269, § 13A, because it permits a distinction between the broad class of law enforcement officers empowered to perform only certain police duties and those expressly designated as “police officers” without such limitations. The definition of police officer in G. L. c. 41, § 98, encompasses a broad range of authority, including the power to make warrantless arrests, that is unique within the class of law enforcement officers. In other words, a police officer is a law enforcement officer, but not all law enforcement officers are police officers. It is this broad authority, granted only to persons appointed as police officers by cities and towns, that defines the term for the purposes of G. L. c. 269, § 13A.

Bottom line: “a deputy sheriff is not a police officer.” You’d think that a ruling so clear and from the highest court in the state would stop Hodgson from trying to impersonate a cop.

But no.

Barely three months following the SCJ ruling, the Fall River Herald News reported that Hodgson and disgraced former mayor (and now incarcerated felon) Jaziel Correia had entered into a backroom deal to have Hodgson run Fall River’s police lockup. Hodgson had tried and failed to sell a similar scheme before when Deval Patrick was governor. This time around Hodgson enlisted the help of a con man. The now incarcerated former mayor swore up and down that two local state representatives had promised to find state funding for Hodgson.

There were just two problems with the Correia-Hodgson deal. The Fall River police reminded all parties that policing by sheriffs was illegal. And Carole Fiola, who served on the Joint Ways and Means Committee and whose name Correira dropped, had to set the record straight when she told the Herald: “It was the first time I heard about it and I am not aware there is a budget request.”

The scheme was both illegal and based on lies.

Classic Hodgson.

Paul Heroux at the State House

Not only in Bristol County, but all over the United States, sheriffs are on the ballot. Given the previous administration’s love affair with Anglo-American sheriffs, America is now paying a bit more attention to these races than ever before.

In Massachusetts sheriffs have extremely attenuated powers but extremely long terms — rivaling that of a U.S. Senator — and very little accountability — all of which affords them a lot of time and opportunity to get into mischief.

By now everyone knows about Bristol County’s Angry White Man sheriff — the community college dropout who has been running our jail by the seat of his pants while making frequent trips to the border with militia members and white supremacists. Not to mention letting an indecent number of people die by suicide while half-starving inmates and gouging their families with usurious phone charges.

Tom Hodgson is like your neighbor, the do-it-yourself plumber, who broke the toilet, flooded the first floor, and left sewage all over. Now cooler heads have to call someone with professional skills — somebody who actually knows what the hell he’s doing — to fix the mess the stubborn hubby has made.

And Paul Heroux is just the guy to do it. Heroux has a bachelor’s in psychology, a master’s in corrections, has worked in corrections doing corrections, and has been running a city government with a budget three times larger than Hodgson’s.

In the process Heroux has also managed to steer clear of the state auditor, the state attorney general, and the Department of Homeland Security — unlike the incumbent clown who couldn’t document a third of his expenses to the auditor’s satisfaction, misplaced ICE payments in one of a dozen slush funds he keeps, who has systematically violated the civil rights of his prisoners, and last year lost his prized 287(g) program because of gross incompetence and cruelty — cruelty borne out of pandering to and offering Republican voters angry red meat.

Thomas Hodgson in an election ad telling voters that jail is not a country club.

Paul Heroux, who sometimes comes across as a brainy technocrat and not a movie-goer’s image of a Western sheriff, is nevertheless unlikely to jet down to the Texas ranch of militia members at taxpayer expense to play dress-up with Western sheriffs, take time off to run the Massachusetts Trump campaign, pose on the Capitol steps with Ted Cruz, Louis Gohmert, or various extremist and anti-government groups he belongs to, or sit on the national advisory board of a hate group — like the incumbent.

Heroux’s not going to put inmates in chain gangs, try to circumvent laws that keep Massachusetts sheriffs from doing police work, try to make deals with a Fall River mayor now serving time in federal prison, do favors for a New Bedford waterfront crime boss, or break federal law by deputizing military recruiters (which earned Hodgson a visit from Navy investigators). And no multi-million dollar legal appeals for lost cases that would never have been heard if the incumbent hadn’t broken laws by violating the rights of inmates or his employees.

No, it’s going to be the sound of crickets again when Heroux is elected sheriff.

Besides not racking up massive legal bills paid for by taxpayers for grandstanding and law-breaking, Heroux is also not going to write “love letters” to racists like Stephen Miller, Trump’s evil genius immigration advisor, or rat out his own church like Hodgson did for the “crime” of his parish caring for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers. For a guy who likes to remind his Trumpy base how “Christian” he is, Hodgson sure seems to have forgotten Exodus 22:21: “You shall not oppress or mistreat a stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt.” Like everything about Hodgson the poseur, even his piety is all show.

But the million-dollar question is — do voters want an aggressive grandstander who just won’t stay in his lane and do his damn job — or are they ready for a little professionalism in a sheriff? I honestly have no idea. Who truly knows the heart of the fickle American voter?

But I’m not the only one to speculate. The Marshall Project covers criminal justice issues and only yesterday published a timely piece: “Progressive Sheriffs Are Here. Will They Win In November?” Since Trump was elected, Progressive sheriff candidates have increasingly run and won.

Sheriffs in the thrall of the Dear Leader

Part of that reason is that voters are beginning to realize just how extremist these overwhelmingly Trump-fanny-kissing sheriffs really are. Overwhelmingly white, a survey by the Marshall Project of sheriff’s political views showed that less than 1% consider themselves liberal, 75% support ultra-right politics, most regard protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder to be orchestrated by left-wing provocateurs and not reflect an authentic response to a police murder. And forget accountability. Less than half are in favor of tracking bad cops. And so on. In addition, a majority of sheriffs think they are more powerful than a sitting U.S. president and can interpret the Constitution any way they see fit and selectively enforce laws.

In short, today’s sheriff’s hold views diametrically opposed to those of majorities in Democratic states like ours.

In Essex County, Massachusetts, social worker Virginia Leigh ran against incumbent sheriff Kevin Coppinger in the Democratic primary and got 48% of the vote — not bad for a first-timer. In Hampshire County, Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse and (again) a first-time challenger, garnered 25% of the primary vote but hammered away on services. Sepeda ran on a platform of delivering treatment to inmates, pointing out that 60% of her county’s incarcerated people have substance abuse problems and 70% self-report mental illness. “Those are not law enforcement issues. Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues,” Sepeda told one reporter.

And she’s absolutely right. Which brings us to the general election on November 8th.

In Barnstable County, Donna Buckley, who is running on a platform of prioritizing programs for inmates and “preparing our inmates for pre-release,” got 30,000 primary votes in the Democratic primary, while Republican Tim Whelan got only 18,000. May these proportions hold in the general election. Besides delivery of services to inmates, federal ICE programs are on the ballot. Buckley has promised to end Barnstable County’s 287(g) program, the only county jail program remaining in Massachusetts.

In Bristol County, Paul Heroux is similarly promising to use — not Hodgson’s cruel medieval approach — but 21st Century tools to run the county jail, to provide services to inmates, to use data-driven management to evaluate rehabilitation programs, and to focus on the mundane job of care, custody, and control of incarcerated people.

To invoke the incumbent’s platform, “Jail is not a country club.” Well, no, it’s not. But it’s also not a torture chamber. It ought to be a short-term treatment center for mentally-ill and chemically-dependent people. The courts and the DA are in the punishing business. The sheriff provides care, custody, and control. Seems simple. Except, perhaps, for some percentage of voters who want sheriffs to impose their own arbitrary punishments on people already being punished.

In her latest essay in the Boston Globe, long-time Hodgson-watching columnist Yvonne Abraham quoted Carol Rose of the ACLU: “Voters are waking up. […] Maybe not this time, but soon, [a sheriff] is going to be held accountable by the voters.” To which Abraham adds: “Please, please, let it be this time.”

Amen to that.

Bristol County’s Chief Trump Bum-Kisser

The New Bedford waterfront has its share of crime, including organized crime. Carlos Rafael, aka the “Codfather,” served time in federal prison on numerous charges, including money laundering. Though no criminal connection has been established between Rafael and Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, two of Hodgson’s officers were convicted of using a Thanksgiving turkey airlift to the Azores (for repatriated deportees) as an opportunity to illegally transfer money offshore for Rafael. The money was carefully divided among couriers (so as not to raise suspicions) and was then recombined and deposited into the “Codfather’s” accounts.

James Melo, a captain with the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, was convicted in Federal court of “conspiracy to commit offenses against the United States and one count of structuring the export of monetary instruments.” Melo got a mild slap on the wrist: twelve months of probation. Sheriffs Deputy Antonio Freitas was slightly less lucky. Freitas, who also served as a deputized ICE agent for Hodgson, was convicted of charges similar to Melo’s but served twelve months in prison.

There is a fascinating account of Rafael’s money-laundering and the role Freitas played in it buried in an appeal from federal prosecutors Mark T. Quinlivan and Trump appointee Andrew E. Lelling. In the document, Rafael boasted of his close relationship with Hodgson and the influence it played in obtaining both a job and a raise for Freitas:

“I got him the job, I got him the raises, so he’ll do what the fuck I tell him to do. He called me. He says, ‘what the fuck is going on, everybody got a promotion in this fuckin’ place but me.’ So I’m like this [gestures] with the sheriff. I called the Sheriff and I said ‘what the fuck are you doing to me Tom? Fuckin Freitas has been there for so many fuckin’ years, you’re not going to give him a fuckin’ promotion and a raise?’ ‘Jesus Carlos, we do not have enough money in the budget.’ I said fuck off, find a way, give the kid a raise. He got his promotion, right, so he called me and said I want to thank you very much, I finally got my fuckin’ promotion and my raise. So it’s nice to know people.”

Rafael’s claim that Hodgson had assisted Freitas was confirmed by Freitas himself, who admitted to Federal investigators “that he had carried money for Rafael in the past because Rafael had helped him get a promotion [from Hodgson] and had co-signed a home improvement loan for him.”

When Hodgson was called to the witness stand during Freitas’ trial, “Hodgson remembered Rafael saying over the phone that he needed a promotion. But Rafael’s call did not influence his decision, Hodgson stressed.” Incredibly — as in “I don’t believe a damn word of it” — Quinlivan and Lelling simply took Hodgson’s word that he had granted the favor because, well, he was going to do it anyway.

But Rafael had access to the sheriff and knew that Freitas “worked on customs with the immigration unit of the Sheriff’s Department. And Rafael said that Freitas could also help the co-conspirators get their cash out of the country by bypassing airport security.” This is because Freitas had received the requested promotion to deputized ICE agent at the jail and had “completed a multiday training program for ICE officers that covered (among other topics) financial crimes, including structuring and bulk-cash smuggling — an instructor, for example, told attendees that structuring involved”having more than $10,000 in cash and breaking it into smaller amounts to conduct financial transactions in order to avoid the reporting requirements.”

Freitas was not only well-positioned to launder money for Rafael, but perfectly trained to commit the crime.

All thanks to Tom Hodgson.

Is Tom Hodgson a white supremacist?

If not, he would have resigned from this ugly crew of satin sheets and brown shirts long ago

Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson has built a career as a cruel jailer on top of allying himself with white supremacists.

In 1999 Hodgson visited Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Tent City” — a facility for Hispanic detainees that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp,” where inmates lived in 120-degree heat the desert in surplus tents from the Korean War and received half-rations of barely-edible food. Hodgson, who enthusiastically adopted Arpaio’s methods, joked to a Boston Herald reporter, “it’s not a buffet here.” After returning to Massachusetts, Hodgson increasingly modeled his own practices after Arpaio’s and even began using Arpaio’s tag line: “jail is not a country club.” And following the footsteps of Arpaio, who in 2016 lost access to his 287(g) ICE program because of systematic violations of constitutional and human rights of his inmates, Hodgson lost his own 287(g) program in 2021 for all the same reasons — cruelty and incompetence.

After September 11, 2001 Hodgson had realized the financial potential of collaborations with the Department of Homeland Security. With massive amounts of money being thrown around to protect the “Homeland,” Hodgson easily received $3.2 million from DHS to build the C. Carlos Carreiro immigration center in 2007, which later became a full-fledged ICE detention facility. He also received federal money for a $250K DHS command center van — now used primarily for Fourth of July parades and public relations.

In 2011 an organization created by a white supremacist optometrist named John Tanton began recruiting sheriffs to do its dirty work. The 2011 Annual Report of the Federation for American Immigration (FAIR) — which both the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) regard as a hate group — began using county sheriffs as spokesmen to oppose (and in many cases to flaunt) national and state immigration and gun control laws. Hodgson was one of the first to sign up. Working with a FAIR organizer named Susan Tully who both the SPLC and the ADL had long been monitoring, Hodgson organized a “fact finding” mission to McAllen, Texas in July 2014. Since then Hodgson has attended dozens of FAIR’s conferences and events, including its “Hold their Feet to the Fire” broadcast events that draw speakers from a variety of allied hate groups. In March 2015 Hodgson appeared with Tully at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford and he has appeared at most of FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events coordinated by Tully (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021).

By 2014 Hodgson was on FAIR’s National Board of Advisors and was “educating” the American Right to the dangers of even DACA recipients. In one of his many trips to Washington DC paid for by Massachusetts taxpayers, on October 11, 2014 Hodgson spoke to fellow FAIR National Board of Advisors on “The Effect of The President’s Decisions on DACA and Its Impact on Our Law Enforcement Challenges.” On September 24, 2016 Hodgson again spoke to FAIR’s National Advisors. The topic this time was “Sanctuary Cities.” Hodgson’s dinner talk immediately preceded one about Jewish “Big Money” and the plot to “Destroy U.S. Borders.” FAIR’s National Board of Advisors is a virtual Who’s Who of conspiracy nuts, anti-Semites, racists, Neo-Confederates, Muslim bashers, white supremacists, eugenicists, and Christian Identitarians.

In October 2015 Hodgson again visited the “Rio Grande” — this time with Robert J. Sylvia, then one of Hodgson’s top brass but now retired, who was all set to run for Sheriff in next month’s election but managed to file his ballot signatures on the wrong form. The sheriffs and their entourage toured the border but also went 70 miles out of their way to visit the ranch of Mike and Linda Vickers, founders of the vigilante group Texas Border Volunteers, an offshoot of the Minuteman Project, a loose-knit group of vigilantes, some of whom are affiliated with White supremacist militias and have been linked to both murders and incidents like the illegal detention of hundreds of migrants in April 2019.

Besides FAIR, Hodgson is also involved with another Tanton group — the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). SPLC does not categorize CIS as a hate group, but CIS functions as a disinformation and lobbying group with extensive white supremacist and antisemitic links. It is led by Mark Krikorian, who first worked at FAIR and who once said about Haiti: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.” The group’s most visible face is Jessica Vaughan, who used the antisemitic newspaper American Free Press, founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto, to flog CIS talking points — as did Hodgson’s fellow FAIR national advisor Frosty Wooldridge. On March 28, 2017 Hodgson testified with CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan at Border Security and Immigration Enforcement hearings in Washington. He also appeared with Vaughan at a CIS-organized event in Boston the following month, and another in West Roxbury the month after that. In January 2020 Hodgson again appeared with Vaughan (a resident of South Carolina) before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security. FAIR-AVIAC also sent two others to testify before Massachusetts legislators.

In 2015 Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a synagogue run by Islamophobe rabbi Jonathan Hausman. Hausman had previously hosted Dutch Neo-fascist and Islam basher Geert Wilders. Over 100 members of the clergy, including other rabbis, protested a similar hate fest the synagogue hosted the following year featuring Muslim-basher Frank Gaffney and Christian nationalist Jerry Boykin. When I asked Hodgson about his talk with Hausman and Lynch, Hodgson said with a straight face that he was just there doing his duty to inform the public about terrorism: “They asked me to come speak about terrorism. That’s what they asked me to do. […] That’s why I was there, because of my my involvement with the terrorism task force.”

In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s “governmental affairs director” and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to be the worst enemies of the country.” It was not the first time Hodgson ignored the anti-Semites he was rubbing elbows with. His involvement with the Jew-bashing Tanton group is no aberration. In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Rick Wiles, a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite who claimed that Obama was inspired by Lucifer and killed Supreme Court Justice Scalia as a pagan human sacrifice, that the Irgun has kill teams all over America, and that Jews will use gun control laws to kill Christians. Wiles devoted “the first half of the program to recount several profound prophetic dreams his family received years ago” and the second half to Hodgson, who discussed immigration and his work with FAIR.

In 2016 Hodgson was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan. The third speaker was Raymond Hanna from the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America which also maintains white supremacist ties. For example, in Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront. Perhaps because of its far-too-frequent neo-Nazi connections, ACT for America was too toxic for even Donald Trump. Following an article in the Miami Herald announcing ACT’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, which was to have been headlined by Michelle Malkin (another friend of Hodgson’s), the Trump administration had second thoughts: “[The gala] will absolutely not be taking place at Mar-a-Lago,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization announced. In September 2016 the sheriff also appeared at a Republican unity rally in Norfolk county attended by his old friend Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies and by ACT for America’s Ray Hannah.

In June 2017 Hodgson appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold Their Feet to the Fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Malkin has links to white supremacist groups, including several Tanton groups and VDARE, as well as to Islamophobic organizations. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves. And, of course, Malkin is also a big fan of both John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints, a racist book that has attained almost scriptural reverence among believers in the Great Replacement, a conspiracy theory that maintains that White people are being consciously replaced and outnumbered by immigration sponsored and financed by Liberals and Jews — a view shared by the 18 year-old white supremacist who marched into a Buffalo supermarket in full body armor last May and murdered ten Black people.

In 2018 Hodgson announced with great fanfare that the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA) would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgson’s NSA project folded after raising less than $100K in three months — despite a false claim that excessive web traffic had crashed the site. The NSA site redirected donors to a group called the American Border Foundation, whose Director of Communications was Jeremy Messina, who identifies with the white Nationalist Identitarian movement and whose Facebook postings bore striking similarities with the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto. The American Border Foundation‘s crowdfunding scheme never reached its $450 million goal. During its three-year run, ABF’s less-than 4,000 donors raised barely over $227K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer — who like Hodgson has ties to FAIR through FAIR’s sister organization AVIAC — went on the conspiracy and white supremacist circuit trying to sell the project. For example, Kramer appeared on the far-right Southern Sense podcast and also on an “anti-federalist” program that frequently invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”).

Despite lackluster donations, Hodgson claimed that as a sheriff he could cut through the red tape to ensure donations got to the Department of Homeland Security and that the wall would be built. In November of 2018, Hodgson claimed he had submitted a form to DHS to donate $100,000 to pay for “border barriers on the Southern border.” But DHS informed the American Border Foundation it could not accept their donation. Nevertheless, in 2019 Hodgson and Kramer were still acting as if the crowdfunding effort was still viable. Both spoke at a FAIR-AVIAC-sponsored press conference in Washington, whose main function was to highlight the “Angel Families” who had lost family members to auto accidents or crimes committed by undocumented migrants. As of today, the whereabouts of $227,657 in ABF donations are still unaccounted for. Neither the ABF nor Hodgson has ever responded to information requests from Bristol County for Correctional Justice or American Oversight.

Hodgson’s newest project is Protect America Now. Once again, Hodgson is not just a member: he’s on Protect America Now’s national advisory board.

On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another collection of uber-patriotic, God- and gun-waving Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members number about 85 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliations. But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I looked into Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer accused of ethics violations, who is also involved with PAN and other voter suppression efforts, and is not coincidentally the owner of Signafide, a company whose AI software is intended to challenge ballot signatures.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) connects Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election. And by “intervene” we’re talking about sheriffs seizing voting machines.

Besides his leadership role in PAN, Hodgson is also a member of CSPOA; in 2014 his membership dues were recorded by the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.

In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would seize voting machines. Lamb, Hodgson’s fellow advisor at Protect America Now, recently teamed up with True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht, who was already working with the CSPOA. Lamb has promised to investigate so-called “ballot mules” — a reference to the Big Lie movie “2000 Mules” by Dinesh D’Souza, who was convicted on felony charges of using “straw donors” to make illegal campaign donations but was later pardoned by Donald Trump.

This is the world Hodgson not only lives in but has chosen to create. Whether Hodgson himself is a white supremacist — or has simply built a career by supporting white supremacists for decades — is a trivial distinction.

Hodgson is either a monster or a fool. In neither case does he deserve to be returned to his job as Bristol County Sheriff.

Detail

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is a member of the National Board of Advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. FAIR was founded by John Tanton, a white supremacist, and a majority of its advisory board are also white supremacists, Islamophobes, homophobes, racists, and conspiracy theorists. Here are a few of the people Hodgson rubs elbows with at board meetings:

Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazelton, PA who signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later;

Sharon Barnes, clearly no DACA lover, who wrote: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts;”

Gerda Bikales, who regards Spanish as a ghetto language: “I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto;”

William Chip, who wants to repeal the 14th Amendment;

Donald A.Collins, who contributes to the white nationalist journal VDARE;

Dino Drudi, another Massachusetts zealot who has written for VDARE;

Don Feder, a Muslim-basher who thinks US troops should have “shoot-to-kill” orders on the Southern border;

Robert Gillespie, a proponent of population control — not for white Christians but in developing countries;

Joseph Guzzardi, a member of VDARE’s “editorial collective;”

Carol Joyal, who wrote a review of The Camp of the Saints calling it a “prophecy” of Third World destruction of the West while everyone else just called it racist;

Richard Lamm, former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are;”

K.C. McAlpin, an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different;”

Scott McConnell, another VDARE author, Executive Director at Lifeway Research (“be ready when homosexuality devastates”), and a member of the Family Research Council;

Paul Nachman, a Montana white supremacist who writes for VDARE who calls refugees “good liars” and questions the existence of “moderate Muslims;”

Robert D. Park, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that government has abdicated its responsibility to uphold a Constitutional clause requiring it to defend the U.S. from “invasion;”

Randy Pullen, former chairman of the Arizona GOP and self-appointed expert on black crime: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers;”

John Philip Sousa IV, great grandson of the famous Sousa, a Birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio;

Alan N. Weeden, whose family owns the Weeden Foundation, major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID, a national identification system.

A couple of years ago Massachusetts state representatives Antonio Cabral and William Straus sponsored H.5083, An Act Relative to Polling Place Security and Integrity. The bill limits sheriffs and deputies from policing polling places unless both local police and the secretary of public safety request assistance. The bill went nowhere.

Massachusetts law already authorizes police to preserve order at polling places, but the bill was filed only after Donald Trump began laying the groundwork in August 2020 for “Big Lie” accusations of voter fraud — three months before the election — boasting to FOX’s Sean Hannity that “we’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling stations sniffing out voter fraud. Trump’s demand for sheriffs to oversee the 2020 election was clearly intended to recycle time-tested racist and authoritarian voter intimidation and suppression tactics.

No sooner had H.5083 been filed when Bristol County’s scofflaw sheriff — and then-state Trump campaign director — Thomas Hodgson promised to defy the law if enacted. “No legislator is going to tell me when I can and cannot respond to someone who needs protection,” Hodgson told the Boston Herald.

Though still smarting from the loss of his 287(g) ICE program, Hodgson hasn’t dropped his anti-immigration rhetoric. But now he’s focused on enabling GOP voter suppression and ballot box tampering.

Hodgson’s new project is Protect America Now. On the surface, PAN’s leadership looks like another motley Hodgson crew of faux-patriotic Constitutional sheriffs. PAN members include an additional 69 far-right sheriffs, some with Oathkeeper affiliation.

But the brains behind PAN is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative and acolyte of Karl Rove, long involved with numerous voter suppression efforts. A while ago I investigated Sproul and Kory Langhofer, a Trump Stop the Steal lawyer also involved with PAN, both of whom share the same office address.

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) has connected Protect America Now, the Constitutional Sheriffs Association (CSPOA), and TrueTheVote in resurrecting Trump’s plan to have sheriffs intervene in the next election.

But by “intervention” we’re now talking about sheriffs seizing voting machines.

In June, PAN spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb, announced the creation of an “election integrity” project that will funnel reports (no doubt as ridiculous as those from Rudy Guiliani and Sydney Powell) to sheriffs for “quick evaluation of incoming information.” And last week at the FreedomFest 2022 conference in Las Vegas CSPOA founder Richard Mack announced that sheriffs would actually seize voting machines.

Massachusetts voters have reason to fear that Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, ever the Trump sycophant, would put his deputies at Trump’s disposal as enthusiastically as he tried to use his inmates to build Trump’s wall.

Hodgson did not appear on the speakers list of the FreedomFest 2022 conference but there is a gap in his social media posts between July 13-16. I have called, emailed, and texted Jon Darling, Hodgson’s media representative, to confirm if Hodgson attended FreedomFest. So far, nothing.

In any case, if we want to prevent the theft of voting machines (and elections), it’s time to dust off Cabral and Straus’s bill keeping our increasingly partisan and authoritarian sheriffs out of polling places.

And then we need to send Hodgson packing in November.

He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will be destroyed. (Proverbs 13:20)

Hodgson’s Great Replacement

On Saturday, May 14th, 2022 an 18 year-old white supremacist in full body armor walked into an East Side Buffalo, New York supermarket and slaughtered ten Black people precisely because they were Black.

Payton Gendron left behind a 180-page manifesto citing the Great Replacement – a conspiracy theory which holds that Liberals and mainly Jews (“globalists” or the “new world order”) are intent on replacing white people with compliant mongrel races who reproduce at higher rates. “This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility,” Gendron wrote, “is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”

For white supremacists, the end of white domination is as frightening as death. Though whites dominate government, courts and commerce, the fears of white supremacists have nevertheless magnified into nightmares of “white genocide” and “replacement” and are found not only in the manifestos of mass-murderers but in mainstream Republican political dogma.

And this includes Bristol County’s white supremacist sheriff, Thomas M. Hodgson.

Replacement was the theme of a 1973 novel by French nationalist Jean Raspail, a book that has captured the imagination of American white supremacists like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, the Identitarian movement, and a considerable number of anti-immigration and white supremacist organizations – three to which Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson has close ties and all of which flog the narrative of the Great Replacement.

Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints was first published in 1973, translated into Englsh two years later and distributed by the Social Contract Press (more on this Tanton group later). The publisher described the book’s theme: “By the year 2000 there will on present projections be seven billion people swarming on the surface of the Earth. And only nine hundred million of them will be white.” Kirkus Reviews noted the book’s inherent fascism: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Inspired by Raspail, in 2012 another French writer, Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert Camus), popularized the “Great Replacement” theory in a self-published novel by the same name, Le Grand Remplacement. Camus also penned You Will Not Replace Us, an homage to the American Alt-Right, and Tweeted: “the genocide of the Jews was undoubtedly more criminal but still seems somewhat small compared to global [white] replacement.”

In fact, le grand remplacement dates back at least to the Thirties when the expression was used by Nazi French collaborator Rene Binet, whose brigade ended up (I’m not making this up) in charge of defending Hitler’s bunker. An article from radioFrance notes that the phrase was probably used even earlier to characterize slave revolts in Haiti and Martinique, as well as to disparage Jews around the time of the Dreyfus affair.

While never truly defeated, Western fascism has been making a bit of a come-back. France’s Rassemblement National, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, England’s British National Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, and Spain’s Vox all wrap themselves in the same white Christian nationalism and anti-democratic authoritarianism that now characterize the American Republican Party. And all are preoccupied with “invasion” or “replacement” by non-white immigrants. It is no coincidence that the American Conservative Union’s CPAC Convention took place in Hungary this year. Fusing pan-European Identitarianism and resurrected fascism with good old-fashioned American white supremacy has long been a project of extremists like Steve Bannon.

But white supremacy cannot succeed without maintaining white Christian privilege and white numerical superiority, at least in the voting booth. Laws and maneuvers privileging white Christians, limiting immigration for non-whites, maintaining police control over largely non-white communities, preventing the diminution of the “white race” by abortion, and ensuring white election advantage – all are methods of delaying the inevitable loss of white supremacy.

The Tanton Network

Spike Lee’s film BlacKkKlansman opens with an unhinged racist, Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard, standing in front of a screen as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation is projected onto his face. Beauregard laments the halcyon days when Anglo-Saxons were unchallenged masters of the nation, and he repeats several times, “We had a great way of life.” Today that lost “great way of life” has become a dog whistle for white supremacists and anti-immigrant groups who want to “make American great again” by making it white again.

Beauregard may be a fictional character, but John H. Tanton was not. Tanton was a Michigan ophthalmologist who single-handedly created a network of over a dozen white supremacist and anti-immigrant groups, half of which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as hate groups.

The three best-known are: the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a lobbying and action group with great influence within the Trump administration; the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS); and NumbersUSA, all of which produce dubious anti-immigration reports and statistics. Tanton also created the Social Contract Press, which first published The Camp of the Saints.

Thomas Hodgson sits on FAIR’s National Board of Advisors and has appeared at anti-immigrant events sponsored by both FAIR and CIS.

Federation for American Immigration Reform

Though they might sugar-coat it a bit, FAIR’s mission is the preservation of Anglo-Saxon dominance from rapacious hordes of non-white, non-English speakers who threaten to replace white Christians and destroy America, thanks to the subversive efforts of globalists and socialists.

Once mainly an anti-immigration lobbying group, during Trump’s presidency FAIR became deeply embedded in his administration. MediaMatters notes that the mainstream media often cites FAIR’s untrustworthy “statistics” indiscriminately. The Libertarian CATO Institute slams FAIR’s studies and statistics as “fatally flawed” and “sloppy.”

FAIR’s legal wing, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, formerly headed by Kris Kobach, provides legal assistance to anti-immigrant groups. In recent years IRLI has dabbled in disenfranchising voters of color based on the claim that “illegals” are risking everything to throw elections for Democrats by voting illegally.

FAIR’s founder John Tanton expressed the organization’s mission most clearly: “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.” And when Tanton spoke of “Europeans” he meant whites: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?”

George Washington University’s Gelman Library contains a repository of letters between Tanton and Otis Graham, a close friend of Tanton who helped him launch and run FAIR in the 1980s and who served as a board member of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Tanton and Graham wanted to create what they called a “League for European-American Defense, Education and Research.”

In 1991 Tanton and Graham took great interest in KKK leader David Duke’s campaign for the Louisiana governorship and were encouraged by Duke’s founding of the National Association for the Advancement of White People: “[T]here is a lot going on out there on the cultural and ethnic (racial) difference” [front], Tanton wrote. Appealing to racists was ultimately going to be “all tied to immigration policy. At some point, this is going to break the dam.”

FAIR, then, was created to mirror Duke’s approach and promote white interests: “There is currently no socially acceptable umbrella organization to which persons of European ancestry can belong to defend and promote their common interests,” Tanton wrote. “Absent such an organization in a highly organized society, European-Americans will continue to see their history rewritten, their character and accomplishments denigrated, and their faults magnified. They will steadily lose ground and position to other groups… For those not resigned to this gradual or not so gradual decline, a new organization tailored to the needs and interests of European-Americans as a group is essential.”

As a proponent of eugenics, Tanton also argued for sterilization of the “lesser” races: “Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less? Who is going to break the bad news to less intelligent individuals, and how will it be implemented?”

Dan Stein

FAIR’s current president is Dan Stein, who often coordinates media appearances and travel for Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson.

In a 1997 interview with “Alt-Right” darling Tucker Carlson, Stein claimed that Latino refugees arriving in the U.S. are godless, low-IQ haters: “Immigrants don’t come all church-loving, freedom-loving, God-fearing […] Many of them hate America, hate everything that the United States stands for. Talk to some of these Central Americans. Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?”

For Stein. immigration is a matter of maintaining white political power. He worries about a power shift attending newer waves of immigration. “It’s almost like they’re getting into competitive breeding,” Stein said in 1991. “You have to take into account the various fertility rates in designing limits on immigration.”

In addition to Stein’s views on recent immigrants, FAIR’s president indulges in a conspiracy theory that invokes the same villains responsible for the Great Replacement: “I blame ninety-eight percent of responsibility for this country’s immigration crisis on Ted Kennedy and his political allies, who decided some time back in 1958, earlier perhaps, that immigration was a great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris, and the immigration laws from the 1920s were just this symbol of that, and it’s a form of revengism…”

Center for Immigration Studies

Like FAIR, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) was founded by John Tanton and publishes questionable reports on immigration. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, CIS maintains extensive links to white supremacist and antisemitic groups. In 2017 the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 2,012 occasions on which CIS circulated white nationalist content.

CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian, who first worked at FAIR, quipped after the deadly 2010 Haitian earthquake: “My guess is that Haiti’s so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.”

Jessica Vaughan, CIS Director of Policy Studies, may be the organization’s best known face – and certainly well-known to Hodgson, with whom she has appeared repeatedly. Vaughan is well spoken and comfortable testifying before Congressional subcommittees. Still, as the Anti-Defamation League reports, Vaughan had no misgivings in April 2014 when she gave an interview to an antisemitic newspaper, the American Free Press, founded by Holocaust denier Willis Carto.

Hodgson goes to work for FAIR and CIS

In 2011, According to FAIR’s annual report, the organization began cultivating sheriffs like Hodgson. “In 2011, we identified sheriffs who expressed concerns about illegal immigration.” FAIR staff “met with these sheriffs and their deputies, supplied them with a steady stream of information, established regular conference calls so they could share information and experiences, and invited them to come to Washington to meet with FAIR’s senior staff. We invited sheriffs who played the most prominent roles in addressing illegal immigration locally to FAIR’s national talk radio event, Hold their Feet to the Fire, where they shared their stories and expertise with listeners across the country.” Since roughly that time Hodgson has been a FAIR spokesman.

In July 2014 Hodgson visited the Rio Grande on a trip organized by FAIR’s National Field director, Susan Tully, who reported: “What we’re doing down here in the Rio Grande Valley is all about public education of our law enforcement officials so that they can see exactly what is going on along the border.”

The Anti-Defamation league already regarded Tully as a conspiracy theorist. She claimed, with no proof, that four million immigrants were granted amnesty in 1986 and – again invoking the Great Replacement – charged the Obama Administration with running school buses across the border to provide free K-12 education for Mexicans. The SPLC tracked Tully’s involvement in organizing a racist housing ban on immigrants in Fremont, Nebraska in which she called immigrants “invaders.” And, for organizing purposes, Tully simply made up the “fact” that Illinois has more “illegal aliens” than California. Tully has also been involved with an Oregon anti-immigration group with extensive militia and white supremacist links.

When FAIR National Advisory Board member Richard Lamm said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are,” he didn’t mean just Latinos but Muslims as well. Susan Tully clarified Lamm’s remarks: “They are not coming here to become Americans,” she said. Rather, Muslims are “promoting colonization of their own religion, of their own culture in towns and taking them over.”

Tully has been spreading hate since 2002 for FAIR. In one interview with radio host Phil Valentine at a 2006 FAIR event in Tennessee, Tully claimed that a Border Patrol agent in Laredo, Texas described arresting the same man seven times. Tully said she asked the agent, “What do you do on the eighth time?” and Valentine interjected: “Shoot him!” Tully laughed and the FAIR crowd cheered.

In March 2015 Hodgson appeared with Tully at the Fisherman’s Club in New Bedford. He has appeared at most of FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events coordinated by Tully, most recently in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021.

In 2016 Hodgson was one of three speakers at a “Patriots Unity Day” rally in Randolph. The second speaker was Jessica Vaughan of CIS. The third speaker was Raymond Hanna from the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America which also maintains white supremacist ties. ACT and FAIR have strong connections — and Tully figures into all of them. In 2016 Tully spoke at an ACT for America event in Idaho. ACT for America also happens to have a Nazi problem. In Arkansas ACT’s “March Against Shariah” events were organized by a Nazi and publicized on Stormfront.

On March 28, 2017 Hodgson testified with CIS Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan at Border Security and Immigration Enforcement hearings in Washington.

In June 2017 the Sheriff appeared with Dan Stein and Michelle Malkin at an annual “Hold their feet to the fire” broadcast with anti-gay bigot Sandy Rios. Malkin too has links to white supremacist groups, including VDARE, as well as to Islamophobic groups. Malkin opposes the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to slaves. And, of course, Malkin is also a big fan of both John Tanton and The Camp of the Saints.

FAIR Board of Advisors

Over the years Hodgson has maintained numerous associations with Muslim-bashers, Anti-semites, gay-bashers, Birthers, and every variety of conspiracy theorist — many of them members of FAIR’s National Advisory Board. In November 2017 Hodgson joined that board.

When asked if his board membership might be construed as endorsement of his colleagues’ views, or at least be poor judgment on his part, Hodgson bristled: “I’m on a Board of Advisors. I go once a year to listen.”

But Hodgson is too modest. In 2014 the sheriff was not listening but speaking to FAIR’s National Board of Advisors when he conducted a two-hour dinner discussion on “The Effect of the President’s Decisions on DACA and its Impact on Our Law Enforcement Challenges.” In 2016 Hodgson participated in the National Board’s “Sanctuary Cities and Law Enforcement” roundtable with Putman County, NY Sheriff Donald Smith and FAIR’s Law Enforcement Relations Manager, Robert Najmulski. Half an hour later, FAIR Media Director Ira Mehlman gave a talk entitled “Soros Hacked: The Truth Behind His Big Money Network to Destroy U.S. Borders.”

Hodgson was present for Mehlman’s analysis of materials that Russian hackers had stolen from Soros’ Open Society Institute, which Mehlman caled a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is often white supremacist code for “Jewish” and FAIR, as we will shortly see, has an axe to grind with Soros not only because he is a liberal philanthropist, but also because he is a liberal Jew.

Besides Hodgson, some of FAIR’s National Board members include:

Lou Barletta, former mayor of Hazelton, PA who signed anti-immigration legislation in 2006 that was declared illegal a year later;

Sharon Barnes, clearly no DACA lover, who wrote: “It is our country. They and their parents need to be kicked out […] strengthen our laws and get rid of the locusts;”

Gerda Bikales, who regards Spanish as a ghetto language: “I don’t think Yiddish or Italian represented a threat to the union. But we are now setting ourselves up for an entrenched language ghetto;”

William Chip, who wants to repeal the 14th Amendment;

Donald A.Collins, who contributes to the white nationalist journal VDARE;

Dino Drudi, another Massachusetts zealot who has written for VDARE;

Don Feder, a Muslim-basher who thinks US troops should have “shoot-to-kill” orders on the Southern border;

Robert Gillespie, a proponent of population control — not for white Christians but in developing countries;

Joseph Guzzardi, a member of VDARE’s “editorial collective;”

Carol Joyal, who wrote a review of The Camp of the Saints calling it a “prophecy” of Third World destruction of the West while everyone else just called it racist;

Richard Lamm, former Colorado governor who said that “new cultures” in the U.S. are “diluting what we are and who we are;”

K.C. McAlpin, an Islamophobe who wants to ban Muslims for ideological reasons: “Congress has used that power in the past to ban the immigration of Communist Party and National Socialist (Nazi) party members who were deemed to be threats to our national security. This case is no different;”

Scott McConnell, another VDARE author, Executive Director at Lifeway Research (“be ready when homosexuality devastates”), and a member of the Family Research Council;

Paul Nachman, a Montana white supremacist who writes for VDARE, calls refugees “good liars,” and questions the existence of “moderate Muslims;”

Robert D. Park, founder of the “Article IV – Section 4 Foundation,” a group which maintains that government has abdicated its responsibility to uphold a Constitutional clause requiring it to defend the U.S. from “invasion;”

Randy Pullen, former chairman of the Arizona GOP and self-appointed expert on black crime: “Yes black lives matter. The best way to end the slaughter of young black men is to take guns away from blacks as they are the main killers;”

John Philip Sousa IV, great grandson of the famous musician, Birther, and friend of Joe Arpaio;

Alan N. Weeden, whose family owns the Weeden Foundation, major donor to white supremacist initiatives, and proponent of Secure ID, a national identification system.

Islamophobia

Although Hodgson swims with racists, Birthers, and antisemites, If there is one group to which he has more connections than any other, it is Muslim bashers.

In 1998 Hodgson was among the first group of municipal public safety officials to attend a four-day conference in Leesburg, Virginia on Strengthening the Public Safety Response to Terrorism. The conference was organized by the International Association of Fire Chiefs in conjunction with the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance and brought together police and fire chiefs from most metropolitan areas of the United States.

In an interview Hodgson said: “We were down there for four days to learn about this new thing that was coming onto our doorstep if we — Actually we were far behind in law enforcement. Because there [were] already people, terrorist activity long going on before that. In fact, if you look at [Steven Emerson’s] ‘American Jihad’ which will be worth your watching, you will see people — Muslims raising their — terrorists rising their rifles, dancing in the hall above stores in New York, saying, kill the infidels, kill the infidels. It’s all on tape. But anyway, so my training down there, I’m thinking, OK, you know what? This is good training, it’s good to be aware. The bag they gave us to carry our materials had a stencil on the front of it with the New York skyline with a target on one of the World Trade Center.”

Steven Emerson’s account of American Muslim rooftop celebrations of 9/11 in New Jersey, and Donald Trump’s recollections of the same have both been discredited. But Hodgson is drawn to self-anointed terrorism and Islam “experts” regardless how unreliable their information or their memory.

In 2015 Hodgson appeared with Dennis Michael Lynch at Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a synagogue run by Rabbi Jonathan Hausman – another self-appointed national security expert. Hausman’s temple had previously hosted Dutch neo-fascist and Islam hater Geert Wilders. Over 100 members of the clergy, including other rabbis, protested a similar hate fest the synagogue hosted the following year featuring Muslim-basher Frank Gaffney and Christian nationalist Jerry Boykin. When asked about Hodgson’s talk with Hausman, he explained he was just there doing his duty to inform the public about terrorism: “They asked me to come speak about terrorism. That’s what they asked me to do. So I was I was to speak with them. […] I was asked — I was invited to go there to speak. That’s why I was there, because of my my involvement with the terrorism task force.”

Lynch’s film, “They Come to America,” was reviewed by the Anti-Defamation League. “In the documentary, Lynch travels the country interviewing people about undocumented immigration. Lynch talks to figures from anti-immigrant groups such as NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform [both Tanton groups]. Lynch also interviews Glenn Spencer of the anti-Hispanic hate group American Border Patrol.”

Like Hodgson, Lynch is a supporter of the Constitutional Sheriff Movement. In 2014 Lynch made a fawning documentary about sovereign citizen rancher Cliven Bundy and in 2016 his bid for president was so off-the-wall that the GOP stood clear. Lynch routinely exaggerates the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States, claims that the Chinese are sneaking across the Mexican border in order to inflict a “cyber 911” on the U.S., and that ISIS is bringing terrorists into the U.S. via Mexico. This is exactly what we hear from Hodgson.

In 2018, Hodgson appeared on FOX News with Bernard Kerik, claiming that in 2015 MS-13 had ordered its members to expand the gang’s presence on Nantucket. Both claimed that MS-13 was recruiting in island high schools. The supposed metastasis of MS-13 in New England has been one of Hodgson’s favorite themes. Yet, as violent and grisly as the gang’s occasional handiwork is, MS-13 membership is down dramatically. In fact, in 2018 the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, said that “we have all but eradicated MS-13 in the Greater Boston area. We’re running out of MS-13 targets.”

Another Islamophobic group that Hodgson is connected to, ACT for America, was founded in 2007 by Brigitte Gabriel. It claims to have more than 1,000 chapters around the country, and espouses the crudest sort of anti-Muslim hate. Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented ACT’s many links with antisemitic, neo-Nazi, Christian right, Identitarian, and white supremacist groups. ACT for America sponsors anti-Muslim legislation and organizes anti-Muslim events with neo-Nazis. ACT for America organizes around the claim that Christianity and Judaism are under attack by Islam. Pastor Jack Hibbs and Stoughton Rabbi Jon Hausman — whom we met earlier — were both speakers at ACT’s 2016 “Religious Persecution” conference in Washington, DC.

In July 2007 Gabriel spoke at the Annual Convention of Pastor John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel (CUFI): “The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arabic world is quite simply the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil and this is what we’re witnessing in the Arab and Islamic world. I am angry. They have no soul! They are dead set on killing and destruction.”

Perhaps because of its far-too-frequent neo-Nazi connections, ACT for America became too toxic for even Donald Trump. Following an article in the Miami Herald announcing ACT’s gala at Mar-a-Lago, which was to have been headlined by Michelle Malkin (another friend of Hodgson’s), the Trump administration had second thoughts: “[The gala] will absolutely not be taking place at Mar-a-Lago,” a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization announced.

ACT might have been too toxic for Trump — but not for Hodgson and his friends from FAIR and CIS. In September 2016 the sheriff appeared at a Republican unity rally in Norfolk county attended by his old friend Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies and by ACT for America’s Ray Hannah.

In 2018 Hodgson and Brigitte Gabriel appeared again at FAIR’s “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event in Washington DC. And on September 26th both Hodgson and Gabriel attended FAIR’s 2019 “Hold their Feet to the Fire” event.

Antisemitism

In 2015 Hodgson joined American Family Association’s governmental affairs director and FOX News contributor Sandy Rios on her radio show at the U.S. Capitol. Rios claims that secular Jews have been the worst enemy of the country, that “so many of the Jews in this country are atheist” and “sometimes turn out to bethe worst enemies of the country.”

Hodgson has had a long acquaintance with Rios, having appeared with her regularly at FAIR’s annual “Hold their Feet to the Fire” events. In 2017 Hodgson appeared at one with Rios, Michelle Malkin and FAIR’s Dan Stein. Rios’s interviews were broadcast on the Christian broadcast network, American Family Radio, which also hosts programs by James Dobson and Brian Fischer. Among other members of the far right in attendance were Tom Roten, Congressman Steve King, Robert Spencer, and Hungarian neo-Nazi Sebastian Gorka. Among other gems, Rios told listeners that immigrants “don’t know basic hygiene.”

On February 10, 2019 Hodgson appeared on the American Family Council’s “Washington Watch” program with Tony Perkins. Perkins, who says that teaching evolution to children contributes to mass shootings, whose Family Research Council fabricates false claims about the LGBTQ community, and who would deny Muslims equal rights to religious freedom and ban mosques, played a central role in the Pompeo State Department’s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, a flagrant effort to make Christianity our state religion.

In 2001 Stephen Steinlight of the Center for Immigration Studies – one of the Tanton groups with which Hodgson is involved, and who suggested that Barak Obama be “hung, drawn and quartered” – wrote a report titled “The Jewish State in America’s Changing Demography.” Reflecting the Great Replacement theory and virtually screaming “Jews will not replace us,” Steinlight castigated secular Jews for their historical support for liberal immigration policies, arguing that Mexicans would soon erode Jewish political power. Steinlight offered himself as an example of a Jew who had come to see the light, saying that his own views had been changed by CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian – whose remark about Haiti you are already familiar with.

For FAIR and CIS, their war against the Jewish embrace of multiculturalism has largely been a failure, and secular Jews like George Soros who still advocate for liberal immigration have become a bitter enemy, as seen in Media Director Ira Mehlman’s 2016 talk following Hodgson’s at FAIR’s National Advisory Board meeting. In 2004 Steinlight issued a call to action with an essay, “High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry” but he still couldn’t make any progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing the “Jewish Establishment” of censorship and repression.

Philosemitism

If liberal secular Jews are the “bad Jews,” then for FAIR and CIS Israel is the “good Jew” and a model of ethno-religious nationalism in which security and immigration are handled the “right” way. In 2019 FAIR’s Mehlman penned an article in the Daily Caller praising Israel’s “separation wall.” Hodsgon has also cited Israel’s wall as a model for the U.S.

In March 2017 Hodgson attended the AIPAC policy conference in Washington, also on the public dime. AIPAC, which bills itself as “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” is the most powerful foreign lobby in the United States. While Democrats (and this includes most American Jews) have increasingly distanced themselves from Israel’s hard-line policies, Republicans have embraced AIPAC, and AIPAC has returned the favor by supporting extreme Christian Right Republican candidates.

Hodgson has not been particularly discriminating in jumping under the political bedsheets with antisemites and crackpots. A poster boy for this is Rick Wiles, an End Times believer and a fierce antisemite.

In November 2014 Hodgson appeared on TruNews — the “End Times Newscast” with Rick Wiles, a conspiracy theorist who, like Hodgson, advocates locking up people whose politics he disagrees with. Wiles devoted “the first half of the program to recount several profound prophetic dreams his family received years ago,” and in the second half Wiles interviewed Hodgson, who discussed immigration and his work with FAIR.

Among Wiles’ more deranged statements in recent years: that Obama was inspired by Lucifer, that Obama killed Supreme Court Justice Scalia as a pagan human sacrifice, that the Irgun has kill teams in America, and that Jews will use gun control laws to kill Christians.

American Border Foundation

But for Hodgson it always seems to boil down to immigration.

In 2018 Hodgson watchers took note when the sheriff announced with great fanfare that the National Sheriff’s Association (NSA) would be crowdfunding Trump’s wall. But Hodgson’s NSA project folded after raising less than $100K in three months — despite his false claim that excessive web traffic had crashed the site. For a time Hodgson’s old NSA site redirected donors to a group called the American Border Foundation.

When Hodgson began his association with the American Border Foundation, its Director of Communications was Jeremy Messina, who identifies with the white Nationalist Identitarian movement and whose Facebook postings bore striking similarities with the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto.

The American Border Foundation‘s crowdfounding scheme never reached its $450 million goal. During its three-year run, ABF’s less-than 4,000 donors raised barely over $227K. Its founder, Gary Dolan, had tried wall-building before via a FundRazr campaign that raised only $12K. The fund’s managing director, Quentin Kramer – who has ties to FAIR sister organization AVIAC – went on the conspiracy and white supremacist circuit trying to sell the project.

Kramer appeared on the far-right Southern Sense podcast and on an “anti-federalist” program that frequently invokes Article IV, Sec. 4, Clause 2 of the Constitution (“the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion…”).

Despite lackluster donations, Hodgson claimed that as a sheriff he could cut through the red tape to ensure donations got to the Department of Homeland Security and that the wall would be built. In November of 2018, Hodgson said he submitted a form to DHS to donate $100,000 to pay for “border barriers on the Southern border.” But DHS informed the American Border Foundation it could not accept the donations.

Nevertheless, in 2019 Hodgson and Kramer were still acting as if the crowdfunding effort was still viable. Both spoke at a FAIR-AVIAC-sponsored press conference in Washington, whose main function was to highlight the “Angel Families” who had lost family members to auto accidents or crimes committed by undocumented migrants.

As of today, the whereabouts of $227,657 in ABF donations are still unknown. Neither the ABF nor Hodgson has ever responded to information requests from Bristol County for Correctional Justice or American Oversight.

Protect America Now

Hodgson’s latest project is called Protect America Now, which looks like nothing more than several God-and-Country sheriffs who oppose immigration reform, gun control, voting rights, secularism, and socialism. The sheriffs include: the group’s spokesman, Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb; Green County (MO) Sheriff Jim Arnott; Livingston County (IL) Sheriff Tony Childress; Bristol County (MA) Sheriff Thomas Hodgson; Brevard County (FL) Sheriff Wayne Ivey; Culpeper County (VA) Sheriff Scott Jenkins; and Wicomico County (MD) Sheriff Mike Lewis.

Despite Protect America Now’s call to “stand strong against lawlessness,” its sheriffs refuse to enforce state gun control laws or COVID-19 mask or social-distancing mandates. Instead, harkening back to the original function of American sheriffs as slave patrols, this motley crew support arming and deputizing their mainly white county residents against “urban” protesters and – again echoing the Great Replacement – border “invaders.”

Pinal County (AZ) Sheriff Mark Lamb is the public face of Protect America Now and a “Constitutional Sheriff” who claimed in one speech to the Arizona Police Association that “the constitution is hanging by a thread.” Lamb belongs to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association founded by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack and spoke at CSPOA’s 2020 Virginia Conference. At least three other Protect America Now sheriffs, Thomas Hodgson, Scott Jenkins and Wayne Ivey, are also CSPOA members.

Contrary to Protect America Now’s marketing on Fox News and elsewhere — Protect America Now is not Lamb’s creation. It turns out the incorporator and director of Protect America Now is Nathan Sproul, a GOP operative who has been accused of, fired for, and charged with multiple counts of voter fraud, and who set up Protect America Now most recently in June 2020. As a sometime associate of Karl Rove, Sproul’s entire career has been devoted to voter suppression and dirty tricks.

The trademark for Protect America Now was created in 2004 and was the brainchild of Kathy W. McKee, who is still listed on a PAC registration with a similar name. McKee was also the driving force behind a 2004 Arizona voter suppression bill, Proposition 200. As soon as McKee got Prop 200 on the ballot, the GOP and every brownshirt and satin-sheeted group in Arizona took an interest. But McKee made the mistake of bringing an unfiltered white supremacist, Dr. Virginia Abernethy, onto the organization’s national advisory board. Abernethy was so extreme for the rest of the racists that the Federation for American Immigration Reform removed Abernethy and took control over PAN to save Prop 200, despite previous support for Abernethy.

The lawyer who incorporated Protect America Now for Sproul is Kory Langhofer, an equally ethically-unencumbered GOP lawyer who fought both the Mueller investigation for Trump and challenged Arizona election results for Trump. Protect America Now and Langhofer’s offices share a common address. Langhofer is also the co-owner of Signafide, a company that uses AI to challenge ballot signatures.

As the GOP increasingly embraces nativism, the extremists have gone mainstream. The innvolvement by high level GOP operatives like Nathan Sproul and Kory Langhofer using sheriffs like Hodgson and their dangerous militia and white supremacist connections says a lot about the party’s transformation.

Not so very long ago it was racists and xenophobic extremists who worked behind the scenes to support the GOP. Now it’s the Republican Party operating behind the scenes to support the extremists.

Confederate Tie(s)

A couple of years ago, someone noticed that an archived page from the Bristol County Sheriff’s Department featured an official portrait of Hodgson wearing a Confederate necktie. Howard Graves, a research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), recognized Hodgson’s tie as an “Old South Confederate Necktie” which resembles the Confederate battle flag and is sometimes called an Anglo-Confederate society tie. Graves added, “Many people affiliated with the broader neo-Confederate movement wear that tie either in necktie or bowtie form.” Mark Pitcavage with the Anti-Defamation League, agreed: “The tie in the photograph seems certainly to be derived from the design of the Confederate flag.”

Despite everything you’ve read so far, Hodgson vehemently denies his sly tip of the hat to the Confederacy. “They know I would not be wearing anything that makes me the poster boy for bigotry.”

Hodgson’s spokesman provided an even more flaccid defense – that Hodgson “has never heard of neo-confederates or anglo-Confederate societies or anything like that.”

Despite the faux outrage and feigned innocence, in the last 24 years Bristol County voters have had ample time to observe a sheriff who openly advocates for white supremacy and rubs elbows with neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis. In fact, there is no one in Bristol County who qualifies better than Hodgson as a poster boy for bigotry.

It’s time for voters to finally send this companion of fools into retirement in November.