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Yep, and the sheriff is a county thing... so how do you influence the sheriff election? By having a shadow government in your town. Towns/Counties influence states, states influence the nation.
It'd be wildly impractical to run for governor for example on day 1 of deciding to begin operations. A governor needs people around them, state police etc. So where do you start? A group in your town that takes over the town council or whatever form it has.
Can't get a plurality on a town council in one election either, need to build community organizations so you get people and aligned and know you, and discover people for other positions. Just to keep a town government in check you need to build your own townie deep state.
Activism needs to be planned over decades, not issue by issue or headline by headline.
It (Covid) proved to me that local matters more and ignored the most far beyond elections even. Local community groups, churches, schools, and all the stuff that you live around you have a far easier time pushing the needle on.
You have to be there and work to earn respect too. IF you just jump in telling everyone what is wrong and how it should be done without ever being involved before you will get ignored. You may get ignored anyway but I get it when loud mouths just start jumping in when they have no skin in the game.
I mean, honestly it starts in your own family, then your neighbors, then your town/neighborhood. I live in an unincorporated area so we have no local government. The community orgs do most of the work and the rest is on the county.
Having a good Sheriff is huge. We had one that refused to enforce the state(California) nonsense during Covid. They are elected to this position. Most people in your communities are practical and care about stuff that impacts them personally. They have no clue that there is anything other than the blue/red teams. Usually that dynamic is not helpful locally.
This stuff is messy. Working with people. People are hard to work with. Much easier to LARP on the Internet about some ideal state of society where bitcoin is supreme and there is not state. But that's a dream long in the future and how do we get there if we all are passive, lazy, uninterested people.
Covid proved to me that you should absolutely really care about your local elections.
Luckily, in my part of TX, our sheriff was against all of the covid nonsense and basically published a letter and sent it to most businesses that read: "If you want to kick someone out of your business its your property you are free to, but I won't be sending any of my deputies to help enforce mask mandates, vaccine card checks, curfews, etc. as none of that is backed by any state law and most would violate the constitution."
The feds / state / city can write whatever laws they want, but ultimately they require your local sheriff to enforce it.