‘Growing community of patriots’ interviews one sheriff candidate while the other steers clear

In a heated race for Orange County sheriff, Montgomery Village Deputy Police Chief Paul Arteta made a campaign stop on Wednesday night, March 30, at a meeting of Orange Strong — a group from which his competitor for the Republican nomination, Undersheriff Kenneth Jones, has been keeping a careful distance.

Arteta spoke to about 50 or 60 people and fielded questions at the meeting at the Rustic Wheelhouse in Chester, N.Y., along with three other candidates for local office. Jones, who was a founding member of the Orange County Oath Keepers in 2013 but left a year later, called out his opponent for currying favor with the new group. It is helmed by the same guy, Chip Murray, who led the Orange County Oath Keepers chapter “well past the point that any reasonable person would have looked at the operations of the Oath Keepers and say, I can no longer be a member of this organization,” said Jones.

“Great night!! Nuthin’ better than a growing community of patriots!” wrote Murray on Facebook after the March 30 Orange Strong meeting.

“Everyone knew I left long before Oath Keepers went south, and here he is with, in effect, the Oath Keeper leader from 2019,” said Jones. Although the Orange County Oath Keepers were defunct by the time the national group became synonymous with the violent extremism of Jan. 6, 2021, there were warning signs years earlier that the group may be taking a dark turn, said Jones. The 2014 armed standoff with law enforcement at the Bundy ranch in Nevada prompted his own departure along with an exodus of about half the local chapter, he said.

“Why would you still be an Oath Keeper in 2019? I don’t think at that point there was any question as to whether or not they wanted to be a militia,” said Jones. “In many ways they were a militia by then, I would think. Perhaps not the chapter here in New York, although some local people were arrested for the capitol riot on January 6.”

At least 13 men from around the Hudson Valley have been charged in connection with that day. There are no known affiliations between the suspects and the Orange County Oath Keepers chapter or Orange Strong.

Orange Strong formed out of the ashes of the Orange County Oath Keepers in 2019, said Murray in a previous interview. According to its website, the community group is focused on protecting Constitutional rights from overreach by the “Administrative State” and disaster preparedness. The group logo is Rosie the Riveter in front of an American flag with 13 stars, an apparent nod to the 13-star Betsy Ross flag, an icon that has, in recent years, become controversial. Full meetings have been drawing up to 85 people, according to Juan Ayala, a Libertarian and semi-regular.

“Honestly, if they had anything to do with the Oath Keepers or anything like that, I would be far away from them,” said Ayala, “because I’ve learned very quickly to know who I’m hanging out with when I start going to these groups.”

The stop at the Rustic Wheelhouse was one of many Arteta has made in the last few weeks, at firehouses, police stations, and Elks Clubs. Repeated attempts to contact Arteta by press time were unsuccessful.

“He might have spoke to them,” said Scott Hamill, a supporter of Arteta. “He isn’t a member.”

Hamill is a former colleague of Arteta and Jones at the sheriff’s office, and is now retired in Sarasota, Florida. “I do know he’s been out speaking to many groups,” he said. Jones, by contrast, he said, “was a member, and he was a recruiter” for the Oath Keepers. (Hamill claims Jones recruited for the Oath Keepers from the sheriff’s office while they overlapped there, an assertion that Jones vigorously denies.)

Murray remained active in organizing after the local Oath Keepers chapter fizzled. He chartered two buses down to the capitol on Jan. 6, though none of the people on those buses participated in the insurrection, Murray said in a previous interview. He blogs regularly on his personal site Standupnsing, where he describes himself as “a Christian-Conservative, Singer/Songwriter, Financial Advisor, and Oath Keeper from Slate Hill, NY... who has discovered the importance of living from the inside out, and turning our world right-side-up again!” Last spring, he registered a countywide Neighborhood Watch in Warwick, a civilian patrol that operates with the blessing of law enforcement. The Orange County New York Neighborhood Watch & Community Preparedness Team consists of six teams covering hundreds of homes, according to its certificate from the National Neighborhood Watch, a division of the National Sheriffs’ Association.

Murray declined to be interviewed for this piece, citing what he felt was this paper’s unfair reporting on the Orange County Oath Keepers. “You brutalized Jones last year in your obsessive attempt to connect him to O.K.,” he said via text. “I’ll sit this dance out my friend.”

Pounding the pavement

Jones and Arteta, who overlapped at the sheriff’s department for 17 years, have been battling for endorsements ahead of the June 28 primary. Arteta got the nod from the Orange County Republican and Orange County Conservative Committee; Chester, Monroe, Montgomery and Minisink Republican committees and unions representing the Walden and the Village of Montgomery Police.

Jones is the choice of the sitting sheriff as well as three unions representing the sheriff’s office’s correction officers, deputies and superior officers, Orange County Legislator James O’Donnell, the Town of Wawayanda Republican Committee, former Senator John Bonicic and former County Clerk Annie Rabbitt — and after his campaign made a refueling stop at his restaurant, Jones also scored an endorsement from Allan Abbad of Allan’s Falafel.

The victor will face the Democratic nominee in a Nov. 8 election to succeed Sheriff Carl DuBois, who is retiring after 20 years on the job. The sheriff’s base salary is $168,000, and he oversees more than 400 employees.

Undersheriff Jones currently makes $137,000. Captain Arteta was making $117,000 when he resigned from the sheriff’s office in October of 2020 and went back to work for the Village of Montgomery Police, where he had worked years earlier. Arteta’s resignation followed an internal investigation over a failure to file a use-of-force report, after deputies dragged a disruptive inmate out of a Middletown courtroom in February 2020. This paper obtained a copy of the investigative report, as well as salary information, from the sheriff’s office through a Freedom of Information Act request. The investigation concluded that Arteta had violated the code of conduct, according to a memo from Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler, and has become a focal point in what is becoming a contentious race for the Republican nomination for sheriff.

“We’re not going to get involved in their race,” said Nick Constantino, campaign manager for the Democratic candidate for sheriff, Bernie Rivers, a former environmental conservation police officer and prison correctional officer. “Bernie’s going to run on his merits, which are many, and not concern himself with what Jones and Arteta are doing.”

What is Orange Strong?

The militia leanings that apparently splintered the Oath Keepers are nowhere to be found at Orange Strong meetings, said Juan Ayala, a conservative Libertarian and person of color.

“No, they’ve been doing this for several years, and I know that they’re very careful about their membership,” said Ayala, a candidate for Middletown school board who spoke before Arteta at the March 30 meeting. Ayala caught wind of a few members who were “basically kicked out,” he said, for “trying to take the group in an extremist way. They were like no, you’re not really welcome here, we’re not about that.”

Ayala said they’re not involved in national politics. “They’re very focused on local stuff,” he said. “They’re not going to be a group that’s going to D.C. or something like that. That’s their whole thing, that’s why their name is Orange Strong, it’s about localism and community.”

Orange Strong protested mask and vaccine mandates last year but has moved on as those issues faded, said Ayala. Unlike single-issue groups like Moms for Liberty or Folding Chairs, which will probably go dark, Orange Strong is here to stay, thinks Ayala.

Orange Strong turned out to be the biggest supporters of Ayala’s recent run for alderman, he said, with six members trekking out to Middletown, from Chester and Newburgh, to knock on doors with him for hours on a weekend. Why the support?

“I’m a big strong defender of constitutional rights, pro 2A, those are things they’re going to love about me,” Ayala said. “Now I don’t think they’re going to love my stance on cannabis, but they overlooked it. There’s a saying, you know, ‘We don’t have to agree on every issue, but if we can agree 80 percent of the time we can work together.’”

Disaster preparedness has long been Murray’s guiding star. He saw the Oath Keepers as an apolitical community preparedness team that stood ready to respond to emergencies, he told this paper in 2018. “During times of significant natural or man-made disaster, our teams can provide direct assistance to communities in any crisis, as was demonstrated by our counterparts in Ferguson, Missouri who helped guard the local residents and business community against arsonists during the rioting that occurred there,” says Orange Strong’s website.

“I am thinking about taking their ham radio class,” said Ayala. “You know, I think it’s a good thing to have. If something happened where we had no power or communications for two weeks, it’s good to have some old-school skill sets like learning how to operate a ham radio or how to store food for two or three weeks without it getting spoiled.”