2008
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I was sitting with a small group, and someone looking at his phone blurted out, “Trump was shot in Pennsylvania!” The person sitting across from me said, “Good.”
At first, I was shocked. Later, I was disheartened.
What happens when people you have known for years advocate violence, censorship, or intimidation to achieve a desired conclusion? Do those means justify any end?
Fear and harassment
I know people in our community who support Donald Trump for president, but they fear possible retribution from placing a yard sign in their yard or a Trump sticker on their car. They fear violence or the destruction of property.
Just last week, a 22-year-old man driving an ATV ran over an 80-year-old man in his front yard for displaying his support for Donald Trump. The elderly man is in critical condition in a Michigan hospital.
We have seen videos from past years where people were beaten in the streets for merely wearing a red Trump hat.
What should we do when people, most anonymous, in Fayette County ferociously troll and intimidate our neighbors on the internet simply because they support a particular candidate? We witnessed this in the Peachtree City mayor’s race three years ago up to the present.
I saw it personally when trolls with fake Facebook accounts began posting horrible lies about my immediate family members because I was writing columns three years ago about city council races in Peachtree City.
Months ago, I had Mayor Kim Learnard telling nasty, fabricated rumors to the public that my wife and I were divorced and our marriage had fallen apart, which is a total lie. I found out about it because one of the gullible recipients of her defamatory email offerings made the correspondence public on the Nextdoor app, thinking Learnard was being truthful.
I assume that Learnard took her malicious actions simply because I had written columns explaining to the readers how she was performing in elected office. Only once has Learnard ever attempted to counter a claim I made about her, and that did not go so well (see: https://thecitizen.com/2024/05/06/welcome-to-the-taxpayer-supported-mayor-kim-learnard-channel-all-kim-all-the-time/).
Who can forget Congress Member Maxine Waters in front of an angry crowd of young adults, directing them to intimidate cabinet members of the Trump administration, saying, “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you tell them they’re not welcome.”
Plotting further against cabinet members through intimidation, Waters exclaimed, “The people are gonna turn on them, they’re gonna protest, they’re gonna absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re gonna tell the president ‘no I can’t hang with you.’”
There are people living in our community, people you know personally, who approve of these tactics. Why do they support it?
Hamstrung nation
Our nation is now incapable of debating many of the fundamental political problems facing this country.
Gee whiz, we have a city council in Peachtree City where council members cannot even get simple city government data regarding a $55 million fiscal year 2025 budget proposal because the mayor and the interim city manager will not permit it. Stop asking and just vote in favor of what they handed you (see: https://thecitizen.com/2024/07/11/council-nastiness-behind-the-scenes-of-massive-peachtree-city-budget-battle/).
“E pluribus unum” has tanked, and the national mainstream media is largely responsible. There is no such thing as a meaningfully significant policy discussion. It’s all pundits spouting catchphrases.
We can no longer have serious debates, much less civil conversations.
If you don’t like a Supreme Court ruling, threaten the justices like Senator Chuck Schummer did, propose adding more justices to the court, and don’t provide any protection for the justices from the crowds protesting outside their front doors.
Disagree with the CNN/MSNBC crowd, and you are a “racist, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic bigot, literally Hitler, and a Nazi fascist.”
If the lawfare is not working against Donald Trump and he is winning in the polls, just kill him.
Can’t see the forest for the trees
One of the biggest misconceptions out there is that many of the people who will be voting for Donald Trump are voting for Donald Trump himself. Honestly, I would never allow my daughters around Trump, and I do not appreciate his lifestyle. I would prefer someone more conservative.
Trump’s Queens, New York, trash-talking style only works because his political opponents are so shallow and self-serving that many voters believe the Republican and Democrat scoundrels deserve the verbal thrashing.
While Trump is an interesting figure, outside of the traditional mold of a modern president, his support derives from not being part of a large two-party bureaucracy that has shackled our independence as individuals, created legislative favoritism, and established a two-tier justice system.
Many of the Trump votes are against the forces that profit from holding Americans down, not necessarily for Donald Trump.
Voters recognize that upholding our revolutionary U.S. Constitution is our lifeline to real freedom and prosperity. Trump just happens to be the only candidate from outside the clutches of institutional politics.
If you oppose the movement to shred the Constitution and foster some forms of tyranny, such as fascism, Marxism, or any other form of oppression, think carefully about who to vote for this November.
Democrats appear to believe that Trump is their problem. Consequently, they fail to see the significant number of people who oppose the Democrats’ willingness to promote a government that de-emphasizes basic freedom in exchange for a totalitarian model that selects the winners and the losers in the most brutal of ways, all under the guise of fairness.
What they do not understand is that most are not voting for Donald Trump; instead, they are voting against those willing to dismantle our Constitutional protections that offer the greatest chance at a free and meaningful life.
Plenty of us have problems with Donald Trump, typical problems you have with politicians, including morals and trustworthiness. Donald Trump is not the first politician we have ever said these things about. They all have weaknesses and are broken vessels in a political system.
Trump voters recognize that in a free country, what we cannot survive is the weaponization of our institutions against our survival. There are plenty of examples in world history to prove that point.
They cannot help themselves
Eight shots were fired, one dead, and two injured. People are already saying it was a made-up “false flag.”
President Biden briefly called for cooling the rhetoric, but that was short-lived.
Just when you think the left-leaning politicians and media outlets might retract the hyperbole around Trump and stop painting him as some sort of modern-day Hitler who’s a threat to democracy, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez immediately filled the void, saying, “Donald Trump is also very old and a racist and a neo-Nazi.”
Threat to democracy
A lot of Democrat elites like to throw the “threat to democracy” tagline out there. They keep painting Trump with that brush, but I have yet to see one threat he has posed to democracy. On the other hand, those same Democrats appear to be cheering the threats to our representative democracy.
Not prosecuting criminal behavior is a major urban Democrat rally point. Here is what Vice President Kamala Harris had to say: “Let’s talk about America’s failure when it comes to understanding how you create safe communities, and by that, I mean this: it is outdated, it is wrong-headed thinking to think that the only way you’re going to get communities to be safe is to put more police officers on the street. What we have to do and what we will do is reimagine public safety.”
How are those reimagined public safety measures like cutting law enforcement budgets going in the urban areas?
Stealing up to $1,000 in merchandise and getting away with it does not seem like such a good idea now. Stores are leaving. Likewise, putting accused rapists and murderers immediately back on the streets without bail does not give off that “safe community” vibe either.
CBS News pointed out that Donald “Trump falsely accuses Harris of donating to Minnesota Freedom Fund, bailing out ‘dangerous criminals.’” You will recall the Minnesota Freedom Fund was created to bail out the Antifa and BLM members charged with arson, assault, and other serious crimes.
Of course, Elon Musk called out CBS for lying about Trump lying and reposted Harris’ tweet that reads: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota” (June 1, 2020, 3:34 PM Minnesota Time). The tweet also contained a donation link.
What about the seven million illegal immigrants allowed across our southern border? It’s a massive violation of federal law. Illegal drugs pour through, and people on the terrorist watch list come across.
Remember when Harris was finally asked about her failures as the border czar? Harris declared, “We are going to the border, we’ve been to the border, so this whole, this whole, this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border, we’ve been to the border.”
Interviewer Lester Holt corrected Harris, replying, “You haven’t been to the border.” Harris came back with, “And I haven’t been to Europe.”
Thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the “Twitter files,” we know that the federal government was actively pressuring social media companies to censor certain political conservative accounts, many of which dealt with the 2020 election and health issues around COVID-19.
Who is the real threat to democracy?
Is political unity a good thing?
According to Tho Bishop of the Mises Institute, “Unity in the hands of most politicians is a word that should send shivers down one’s spine. Political unity means bipartisanship, the triumph of the regime. National unity gave us the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, the Patriot Act, and the Iraq War, among other disasters. It is wrapped up in the state’s most powerful propaganda, usually some form of paternal patriotism.”
“It should also give us pause that the closest Trump came to a ‘unity’ moment during his first term was the nation’s response to Covid-19, resulting in the canonization of [Anthony] Fauci and prompting the greatest wealth transfer in modern history,” says Bishop.
Tax burdens grow, government spending accelerates, program outcomes are poor, and federal indebtedness can endanger future generations. These are generally bi-partisan problems.
There is no doubt that many of our governments, from local to federal, need reform, but unity on issues in the federal sphere seems to always favor the special interests.
Perhaps the answer is we need less government, a deeper understanding of serious issues, and average Americans to debate civilly with one another again.
[Brown is a former mayor of Peachtree City and served two terms on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners. You can read all his columns by clicking on his photo below.]
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