The Left Is Coming for Your County Sheriff

The left's favorite billionaire oligarch, George Soros, has poured money into the campaigns for secretary of state and district attorney candidates over the years in an effort to place anti-law enforcement and anti-incarceration activists in control of elections and law and order—the very foundations of civil society. Now, the left is coming for your county sheriff—the last local law man or woman elected to office by the people.

This odious idea is happening mostly along the West Coast, Messed Coast™ in San Francisco, Riverside County, and California cities, but it's also happening in Arizona, the woke areas of Prince William and Loudoun counties in Virginia, East Baton Rouge, La., and North Carolina.

Like a weed, however, this movement has taken root in Washington state, where proof of concept exists. And it's an ugly and noxious weed.

Washington state's Democrat supermajority legislature passed a law that put elected sheriffs under the scrutiny of a hand-selected committee, and Gov. Bob Ferguson, a former attorney general, signed it into law. The committee gets to determine whether a sheriff elected by the people is “qualified.” What does “qualified” mean? Apparently, anything they want it to mean, including what they construe as “hate speech.” And who selects the committee? The far left in charge.

Seattle put a measure on the 2020 ballot, at the height of the defund-the-police era, that turned the elected King County sheriff into a eunuch working for the head of the leftist cadre running the place. The sheriff, who used to independently decide whether to work with the feds, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, now must go hat in hand to his new overlords. The sheriff oversees who receives concealed-carry gun permits, but reports to the forever-woke King County executive. Under the executive, hug-a-thug is in and take a bad guy to jail is out. Staffing, pay, and other essential functions that the sheriff used to handle are now done by the drones at the executive's office. The budget priorities, policies, and defined duties of the sheriff now belong to the King County executive, not the sheriff they vote for.

Keep Up! West Coast, Messed Coast™—Spokane Arsonist Was Wearing the Same Shirt He Wore to Set Fires Last Year

To consolidate this electoral squeeze play on the local sheriff that started in Seattle, the legislature passed—in the name of democracy, you understand—the statewide bill mentioned above, which has been appealed to Washington judges. Gee, we hope the judge isn't like this guy: Watch 'Unbiased' Leftist Judge Become Completely Unhinged in Open Court in Election Case.

In nearby Tacoma, Wash., fresh from a Here Is What Democracy Looks Like drum circle, the city council decided it didn't like the new sheriff there, who'd just been elected by the people. Keith Swank is a sassy, savvy, serious Christian man, who was a 30-plus-year veteran of the Seattle Police Department before he was elected sheriff. He knows a thing or two about law enforcement. He's definitely not a guy who cares about pronouns.

He had to go, and the left would make an example of him.

To get rid of the sheriff, the council placed on the November ballot a measure to take the election of the sheriff off the shoulders of the Pierce County voters, poor things, and arrogate that power to themselves. If it passes, Swank would lose the last two years of his term, that, you know, he was elected to. (See our conversation on The Adult in the Room Podcast below.)

Undermining the sheriffs' elections is spreading and it's not by accident. It's becoming another one of those Soros-like projects. This time, however, the money is coming from what used to be called the Arabella Advisors. After white-hot scrutiny from conservatives and Congress last fall, Arabella changed its structure, with its fiscal-sponsorship business becoming Sunflower Services and its remaining consulting business becoming Vital Impact, and it's believed it did so to apparently hide some of its projects and to avoid public accountability.

Seamus Bruner, who works with Peter Schweizer at the Government Accountability Institute, warned in a recent Hillsdale College speech that Arabella and its subgroups are taking point on a program to go after democratically elected sheriffs. He said it as a serious warning, but in a very short, almost offhand comment to a questioner. While I haven't been able to get an interview with Bruner again to flesh this out, I began an investigation in an attempt to find out about this campaign.

Bruner said that at the same time the left is becoming more militarized and organized, they are removing the power of the electorate over the last elected law man or woman. They are devolving power from the people to the left.

Sunflower—I mean, who could ever hate a group of commies who call their group "Sunflower"?—funds its partners, such as the New Venture Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Windward Fund, and those funds go into the pockets of other groups.

The path of money goes something like this: Sunflower to Hopewell Fund to justice groups such as "States United Democracy Center" and local "oversight" commissions and "justice reform groups" and the Democratic Party.

Heh: West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Remember the Time Guys on Skid Row Got Paid to Impersonate Voters?

The States United Democracy Center, which used to be known as the Voter Protection Program, was created in part by Norm Eisen, who was one of the architects of the impeachment and lawfare pogrom against President Donald Trump. He and his friends started the hilariously and ironically named Voter Protection Program to stop anyone from talking about the Democrats' 2020 election, ah, activities. It claims to work with Georgetown Law School.

Get it?

On the ground, the Sheriff Accountability Action group, the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, the Los Angeles County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, the Riverside County Democratic Party, and reform groups tied to San Francisco’s sheriff oversight measure have attempted to pressure sheriffs, especially Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, who ran against his nemesis Gavin Newsom for governor.

These groups are attempting to subvert the constitutional sheriffs movement—a movement that is growing. The States United Democracy Center really hates this movement. Not all sheriffs claim they're the top lawman in charge of this county and can decide what's constitutional or not, but getting rid of all elected sheriffs seems to circumvent inconvenient questions.

Get it?

Press your advantage, consolidate power, cut out voters who are too dumb to vote—except when they need their vote to cut themselves off from future votes—and call it democracy. It's like all the autocrats who get into power and then cancel the next election, or five.

Believe it or not, oh, who am I kidding? You'll believe this. Under Joe Biden, the Department of Justice was supporting these kinds of groups with grants.

According to congressional testimony under oath from the Capital Research Center's executive director, Scott Walter, "Another Justice Department grantee and contractor is the Acacia Center for Justice, spun off from the Vera Institute, a hard-Left, Soros-backed group famous for its soft-on-crime, soft-on-illegal immigration advocacy."

Hmmm–Seattle Can't Afford Cops, but Sure, $300K for Trans Fugees Is Totally Legit

This program got nearly a billion dollars to stop immigrants from being detained and stop electronic surveillance (ankle monitors and police work), and to stop local police and sheriffs' agencies from working with the feds.

Do I really need to put another "Get it?" here?

This is what the left's "democracy" looks like.

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