Stanislaus freedom supporters aren’t all “angry, violent, toxic extremists”
My uncle, Frank Byrd, died fighting the German National Socialist regime in the Battle of the Bulge. His name is on a memorial to local war dead on the Stanislaus County courthouse lawn.
In 2001, I participated in a 23-day fast to protest the incarceration of Afro Cuban dissident Óscar Elías Biscet. My circle of friends includes people of many faiths, colors and creeds.
I have loudly and publicly denounced both the words and actions of Nathan Damigo’s Identity Evropa, the local Proud Boys chapter and Mylinda Mason, a Modesto pro-life activist who apparently took Trump’s presidency as permission to embrace white identity politics.
My opposition to racism is rooted in both my opposition to collectivism and the pro-life ethic to which I subscribe.
I did not vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020. I reject the “stolen election” narrative. My view of QAnon: at best, Slavic trolls having fun at the expense of gullible Trump supporters, and at worst, a disinformation campaign to neutralize the American Right by damaging its credibility.
The Modesto Bee-McClatchy Newspapers ran a series of articles denouncing frustrated citizens and concerned parents as “angry, violent, toxic extremists.” One of these articles was almost a copy-paste of the scandal-plagued Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups.
Over the past two years, peoples’ livelihoods have been destroyed. They had the things that gave their lives joy and meaning taken from them by an overreaching government. These people are angry and are right to be angry. The unsympathetic “let them eat cake” mentality from our nation’s elites made them even more angry. It is also unjust to attack concerned parents as “angry, violent, toxic extremists.” I have attended anti-lockdown demonstrations and I have not seen violence, though I did see righteous anger.
Throughout history we have seen righteous anger motivate people not to violent action, but to peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience. Henry David Thoreau was angry at the federal government for its tolerance of slavery and the war on Mexico, so he refused to pay taxes in protest and wrote the essay coining the term “civil disobedience.” We have seen civil disobedience and peaceful protest alter the course of history here in America and across the globe from civil rights movements to antiwar demonstrations. The modern anti-lockdown movement carries on this tradition.
The public education system as we know it must be abolished, but as long as it exists in its current form, parents and taxpayers should have more say in what their children learn in the classroom. Reasonable parents would not want their children indoctrinated in ideologies not in harmony with their beliefs.
It appears that today’s culture has made parents advocating for their children and wanting to protect them “extreme.” If that is so, what’s wrong with being extreme? Parents are extremely worried for their children. If their children are threatened, parents, especially mothers, become extremely protective.
When I was in grade school in the ‘80s, a principal wanted to put me on Ritalin and other behavior-modifying drugs. My mother flung the office door wide open and called him a dope pusher, loud enough that the whole office could hear, and told him he had no business being around children. My late mother, who was a registered Democrat from 1961 until 1998, who still thought of herself as a centrist until her passing in 2017, would have taken great umbrage at being called an extremist, yet her actions might have gotten her labeled as such today.
I am worried that media portrayals of “extremists” hijacking local legislative bodies will lead those bodies to ban public comment from those meetings. It already happened in Campbell County, Wyoming, when 80 parents showed up to object to sexually explicit material available to youngsters in the public library’s children and teen sections.
Local legislative bodies need to be accessible to the public. Public comment at city council, county supervisor and school board meetings are a vital feature to our representative republic. The public must inform our local elected officials of their views. It is important for elected officials to listen to those views and weigh them in their deliberations. Without open government, we get closed, tyrannical decision making.
The right to peaceably assemble and to peaceably petition to redress grievances is protected by the same constitutional amendment that protects the right of this Bee and its parent corporation to unjustly characterize concerned parents and frustrated citizens as “angry, violent, toxic extremists.”