Radio station WBSM on the South Coast of Massachusetts is to the Bristol County Sheriff, Thomas Hodgson, what Fox News is to Trump.

I had been on the station the week before our Rally at the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford, and was given the opportunity to explain the rally and the reasons for it.

I was able to explain that in January 2017, when Tom Hodgson announced that he was volunteering inmates in the Bristol County House of Corrections to build the border wall, a group of individuals and organized groups joined together to form Bristol County for Correctional Justice.

In its ongoing research of the sheriff and his performance at the jail, BCCJ found that in spite of over half the inmates in his jails still having yet to have their day in court and, therefore, remain innocent until proven guilty, Hodgson has the highest suicide rate of all state’s county jails; supplies insufficient medical and mental health care; lacks rehabilitative services; overuses solitary confinement; disregards legally mandated reporting requirements; profits off overpriced inmate phone calls; enjoys non-job related travel at the taxpayers’ expense; is involved with white supremacist and anti-immigrant organizations; and, as was recently revealed, has been spying on individuals, churches, businesses, and social organizations in Bristol County without their knowledge, and reporting them to Stephen Miller at the White House since 2017.

His job is to run his jails, and he is, obviously, doing a poor job of that.

We were rallying to get the public’s attention to these abuses and to get the sheriff to establish real, comprehensive medical and mental health services; comply with laws regarding solitary confinement; promote transparency and real accountability; open his books to a real audit; allow non-North Korean style inspections of his jails; ensure humane and respectful treatment of ICE detainees; stop making broad and baseless anti-immigrant claims without the facts to support them so he can appear to be tough; and using his white supremacist, anti-immigrant statements to get Trump’s attention for self promotion at the cost to residents and the safety of the people of Bristol County.

Or, failing this, do the right thing and step down.

I was informed during a break in the broadcast that the sheriff would be on the show by phone after me during which time, having never met me, nor having any conversation with me, like his idol who assigns nicknames and makes uninformed statements, he told the listening audience that I was an uninformed socialist, “socialist” being the go-to scary word that gives away who makes up the listening audience.

I found out the following Friday that a different radio host than the one whose show I had been on, as a defender of the sheriff had found fault with what I had said about him and was challenging me to call in to “discuss”. Apparently he predicted that I would not accept the challenge, that being a good prediction as his show is on from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and as I am retired and would be just having my first cup of coffee as the show entered its third hour and I don’t listen to that station anyway, I did not hear the challenge.

The station has my contact information, but contacting me directly, which could have been productive, wouldn’t have been as dramatic and controllable.

The rally was held as planned in spite of the cold temperatures, and it was attended by people on a continuum of ages, sexes, orientations, races, creeds, and national origins, but one of the radio hosts decided that we were all “The illegal alien lobby”, undefined, who hated the choices made by the voters “unless it is in Cuba or Venezuela”.

One sign that the radio station is partial to the sheriff was their referring to him by the title he uses on his website that is an untrue aggrandizement of his actual title. He calls himself, and the station did as well, the “High Sheriff of Bristol County”, which is actually the official title bestowed in England by William the Conqueror when he established his constabulary after the Battle of Hastings, and not the actual title in this country where he is just called the “sheriff”.

Another was that, even though the station claimed “Sheriff Hodgson did not appear at the demonstration”, it was clear this was a piece of fiction as having gone directly from my nearby apartment to the jail to greet any attendees who might go there directly to avoid the walking, I was there for a while with two other people as the sheriff department’s K-9 Units drove by a number of times, and while a local clergy person among the three of us spoke with the sheriff who had pulled up in his SUV and rolled down his window before he drove over and parked the SUV in the small parking area on the northern side of the jail’s entrance.

Prior to this, he had driven down town where he drove pass the approaching marchers and, with his window rolled down, checked them out.

 One of the station’s hosts claimed the “hardcore radical left” was out supporting illegal aliens, while ignoring the statistics on suicides, recidivism, poor mental and medical health programs, the over-use of solitary confinement, and questionable finances among other reasons for the protest and, again, appealing to those of its listeners of a certain age, referred to the marchers as people who used to walk the same streets supporting the Viet Cong and the Communists in North Vietnam as they were killing and torturing American soldiers.

And, promoting the sheriff’s tactic of appealing to the fear of big cities with their non-white populations held by those in the smaller towns in the county, he went on to say,

“Everybody understands the illegal aliens aren’t moving to wealthy towns like Marion and Wellesley; they are moving to Bristol County cities like Fall River and New Bedford.”

I have learned from many decades of union, civil rights, and GLBT activism that a common trait of many people in power is their assumption that, if they are not aware that you have information, they assume you do not have it, and act accordingly.

To hear Chris McCarthy of WBSM tell it, those who find fault with the sheriff have no basis for their complaints, presenting himself as an unbiased judge of the situation, and his non-biased views lead him to fall on the side favoring the sheriff.

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The ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request to the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office resulted in more than just the emails among which were those revealing that the sheriff has been spying on the residents of the county, but also in tweets and texts from the radio station and Mr. McCarthy dealing with scheduling media appearances so the sheriff could spread his anti-immigrant biases and promote himself.

They also contained heads up messages sent to the sheriff from the radio station so that, unlike any other person being interviewed and unaware of the questions in advance, he could be totally prepared for the spontaneous questions from Chris McCarthy, the person from WBSM who had bad mouthed those marching against the sheriff while praising him as the “High Sheriff of Bristol County”.

There are also messages from the sheriff’s spokespeople to the station and McCarthy.

McCarthy compared him to the president:

“The Sheriff and you as his media person changed the national conversation in the way only a President can usually move an issue. Tremendous job.”

There are messages from the sheriff’s spokesperson that show, besides the heads up he gets, Hodgson actually has a radio schedule,

“Hi Chris, I’m out of the office this week. Brock is handling this stuff and has his [Hodgson’s] radio schedule for the next few days.”

There are messages from the sheriff’s spokesperson that show, besides the heads up he gets, Hodgson actually has a radio schedule,

“Hi Chris, I’m out of the office this week. Brock is handling this stuff and has his [Hodgson’s] radio schedule for the next few days”

The spokesperson also wrote of Hodgson’s suggestion,

“Hi Chris, Congrats on the new show. Sheriff asked me to get in touch. He mentioned you wanted him to come on sometime. Right now, our best bet is a call in tomorrow or an in-studio on Tuesday or Wednesday. Also, if you want to set something regular up, say every Friday or every other Wednesday or the first Thursday of the month or whatever, we’re open to that as well.

McCarthy admits in one message to the sheriff’s spokesperson,

“we do enough together to have you call or text me. Send me a text when you have a moment so we can communicate rapidly when needed. Thanks.”

In a reference to a local social justice group that he referred to after the Rally on January 18, 2020 as the “illegal alien lobby”, he once wrote regarding an upcoming election a while back,

“I understand the Commies at the Coalition for Social Justice are going to run SEIU organizer [name omitted by me]in the special.”

and

“Off the record: Have you heard anything about [name omitted by me] running for the open NB Ward 3 CC seat?”

When the legalization of marijuana was under consideration, this sheriff’s spokesperson notified the radio host,

“Hi Chris. Sheriff was interviewed by the herald today about that stoned kid who hit the school bus in Gloucester. Just wanted to let you and the other radio guys know he’s available to take the anti-weed side if anyone’s interested. Thanks, and merry Christmas.” 

There is also an exchange in which McCarthy sends a private text to the sheriff about a New Bedford City Council member’s letter to the state legislature on marijuana dispensaries  in preparation for a forthcoming interview:

I sent TH a text with the letter NB CC [-] sent to the state legislature asking them to change the law on local control. This story is going to be big and I wanted Tom to have all the information in advance of the media.

The spokesperson responded

“Awesome. Thx Chris. We will be ready for it when it hits.”

Was the City Council member informed that the radio station was preparing the sheriff for the interview, or did they allow him to believe the interview was going to be spontaneous and held on equal footing?

The sheriff’s spokesperson sent McCarthy a Tweet thanking him for Hodgson’s chance to vent on his favorite topics:

“Hi Chris, just wanted to follow up and say thanks for having the Sheriff on this morning. Trump, immigration, Elizabeth Warren … he was in heaven. Anytime you want to chat again on Herald of BSM, just drop us a line …. thanks, Jonathan.”  

McCarthy returned,

“Jonathan, I just spoke with the Sheriff and scheduled him to call in to Boston Herald radio this Friday morning at 7:20am to discuss [a] press release.”

That press release was from Hamilton Strategies, a “full-service communications firm serving Christian non-profit organizations” that is also a propaganda center for Islamophobia and Homophobia, dealing with an interfaith celebration of an “Anti-Hate” event at the Islamic Society of Boston excoriating liberal Jews and Christians who attended the event, including Marty Walsh and Elizabeth Warren, accusing the Islamic Center of being a “terror-linked, Saudi-funded radical mega-mosque”, and mentioned a planned machine gun attack on a “mall in Attleboro, MA.”

In this vein, McCarthy attempted to link the Islamic Center to this terror attack on a mall in Attleboro and sent an article to Hodgson informing him of spontaneous questions he intended to ask the sheriff.

“There is a section in the press release that mentions a planned machine gun attack which we will be asking about.”

For those who don’t remember that mall attack, the reason is because there was no such plan and no such attack.

This station and its radio host, while posing as a neutral defender of a wrongly maligned sheriff, and misrepresenting citizens of Bristol County as anti-American because they want the sheriff to do his real job, actually has a close and rather cozy relationship with him supplying him with information they will be discussing on shows, feeding him with topics and questions that will appear in solo and multi-people interviews while pretending the questions are spontaneous and the sheriff is hearing the content of them for the first time and at the same time as anyone else on the show, and while he has played the role of a righteously indignant person horrified by the actions of “illegal aliens”, feeds the sheriff anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant falsehoods to help the sheriff fine tune his tropes, while remaining stuck in the 60s by equating the marchers at the anti-sheriff rally, many of whom had not been born yet, with walking “the same streets supporting the Viet Cong and the Communists in North Vietnam as they were killing and torturing American soldier”, while buoying up a man who seeks the attention of a five time draft dodger.

As McCarthy wrote to Hodgson’s spokesperson,

“The Sheriff and you as his media person changed the national conversation in the way only a President can usually move an issue. Tremendous job.”

And for the curious, there are more related messages.