Former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio recorded a video welcoming a furry convention to the state, although he doesn’t seem to have known what that actually is.
Arpaio garnered national infamy over the last few decades for his regressive approaches to justice, immigration, and race. After losing reelection in 2016 and several races since, he’s faded from the public eye, but now he’s back and on Cameo, a platform where users can purchase short video messages from public figures. He’s recorded a handful of unremarkable videos, but one recent one has caught the internet’s eye.
“Good luck organizing the Arizona Furry convention,” he says in a video that began circulating online Tuesday, mispronouncing “furry” as “fury.” He adds that he doesn’t know exactly what furries are — it’s a community of people who have fun interacting as anthropomorphic animal characters — but that he’s always loved animals. He says that if he could be an animal, he’s “partial to dogs.”
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The video was commissioned by a user going by the name “Sir Yiffs A Lot.” (The word “yiff” is slang for sex in furry circles.)
Response to the video and Arpaio’s cluelessness was swift. Various political figures who are a bit more clued-in shared the video with dismay, with one progressive lobbyist tweeting, “Have you had your day ruined yet?" The head of Arizona’s state house Democrats wrote that it was “the stuff of nightmares."
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For their part, the furry community has generally responded with discomfort at being associated with Arpaio.
When asked for comment by the Arizona Republic newspaper, Arpaio said he didn’t think it was a prank and that he was happy to offer a message of support. “I have to do something to take up my time,” he said.
Since he was first elected sheriff in the 1990s, Arpaio has become notorious for the cruelty meted out at the jails that he oversees. Inmates were fed “nutraloaf,” a barely-edible form of food, and he created what he called a “concentration camp” of tents where inmates were forced to endure temperatures of over 110 degrees.
Arizona’s Maricopa County jails, just south of Phoenix, have been found to frequently violate inmates’ constitutional rights by restricting their access to medical care. Arpaio created chain gangs — groups of prisoners doing labor while chained together — that included juveniles and people forced to work seven days a week.
During his tenure, Arpaio’s office failed to investigate hundreds of sex crimes, and money allocated for investigating child abuse simply vanished.
Arpaio’s career neared its end after a court found that his office was continuing a practice of illegal racial profiling. He was found guilty of contempt but later received a pardon from Donald Trump, as Arpaio was an early supporter of his 2016 presidential campaign. Still, the controversy proved enough that voters turned on Arpaio and voted him out of office.
He subsequently ran for U.S. Senate and for his former job, losing both elections.
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