A reply to Harry Booth
in Dartmouth Week
To the editors:
Harry Booth makes light of criticisms of Sheriff Thomas Hodgson's substandard food and extremist connections, suggesting that both charges are inventions.
In 2018, following food protests by 60 ICE detainees and 250 other prisoners, the Standard-Times ran a series of articles on Hodgson's lousy food: "Most Bristol County inmates — including people presumed innocent while they await trial — received no fresh fruits or vegetables in their diets until after The Standard-Times began to investigate. […] The Standard-Times also found expired food in the pantry and meals some inmates consider inedible or too small, pushing them to rely on high-priced snacks from the commissary."
When the Standard-Times tried to contact the dietitian who approved the menus, Hodgson spokesman Jonathan "Darling said the dietitian was not comfortable speaking to the media but would answer emailed questions if the messages went through his office. Not long afterward, she resigned… The Standard-Times was unable to reach her afterward." In the 2018 documentary "American Sheriff" Hodgson called his inedible, unbalanced menus "nutritious" but also acknowledged: "When I first came here … inmates … would get almost as much food as they wanted. And I believed that was the formula for failure…." Mr. Booth failed to cite that quote.
Before Hodgson went all-out for cruelty, in 1999 he made a pilgrimage to Joe Arpaio, Arizona's racist sheriff who ran a facility for detainees that Arpaio himself called a “concentration camp,” where inmates lived in 120-degree heat in 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.”
Hodgson's cruelty and political extremism have always gone hand-in-hand. And starvation and cruelty are central because there seems to be a certain constituency for cruelty among GOP voters.
After returning to Massachusetts, Hodgson increasingly modeled his own practices after Arpaio’s and even started using Arpaio’s tag line: “jail is not a country club.” And just like 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.
In 2020 I wrote a piece in The Public Eye titled "New England's Joe Arpaio" which documents a number of Hodgson's white supremacist connections. And it has about 200 footnotes Mr. Booth may wish to check out.
For starters, Hodgson is a national advisor with the hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), founded by a Michigan white supremacist named John Tanton. Hodgson has extensive connections with and has testified before Congress and the Massachusetts Senate with the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), many of whose contributors write for the white supremacist journal VDARE and whose Executive Director Mark Krikorian once said of Haiti, "My guess is that Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn't colonized long enough."
Hodgson's first work for FAIR was organizing sheriff tours of the Rio Grande, and on one of these taxpayer-funded junkets visited the ranch of Mike and Linda Vickers, a couple involved with a Minuteman militia offshoot. In 2017 Hodgson joined FAIR's National Advisory Board, a veritable who's who of racists, conspiracy theorists, homophobes, antisemites, and Muslim-bashers.
Hodgson worked to crowd-fund Trump's wall with the American Border Foundation, whose communications director Jeremy Messina's now-deleted social media shows he's both a white supremacist and a Christian Identitarian. And for his latest anti-government project Hodgson has lent his name to the leadership of Protect America Now (PAN), which has partnered with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA, an anti-government group which OCPF records show Hodgson paid membership dues to) and the Election Denial group True the Vote to "protect" voting machines in the next presidential election.
For years Hodgson has attended events sponsored by FAIR and its spinoffs and front groups, as well as a FAIR event called "Hold their Feet to the Fire," where sheriffs and a variety of homophobes, Neo-confederates, Muslim-bashers, antisemites, and Christian Nationalists go on air on right-wing talk radio. 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 called Soros’ Open Society Institute a “shadowy foundation” with a “globalist agenda” to attack U.S. immigration policy. But “globalist” is often 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. In 2001 Stephen Steinlight published a report with the Center for Immigration Studies 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 offered himself as a hopeful example, saying that his own views had been changed though dialog with CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian. In 2004 Steinlight ratcheted up the urgency to Defcon-1 with an essay, "High Noon to Midnight: Why Current Immigration Policy Dooms American Jewry," yet he still wasn't making progress with secular Jews. By 2010 Steinlight was frustrated and angry at his co-religionists, accusing a variety of 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…"
There's a lot more than I can cover here but I hope this answers Mr. Booth.
Hodgson's most intimate political bedfellows are mostly racists, white supremacists, antisemites, Islamophobes, and gay-bashers. So what does that tell you about HIM?
For a version of this letter with hyperlinks, go to ehrens.substack.com/p/harry-booth
David Ehrens
Dartmouth