Then-candidate Donald Trump takes the stage in what was then Germain Arena in Fort Myers, Fla., on Sept. 19, 2016. (Video: Author)
Nov. 22, 2023 by David Silverberg
“How did we get here? Ten years ago Collier County wasn’t like this.”
That was one of the questions posed to Rev. Paul Raushenbush and a panel of community leaders on Nov. 9 at an event titled “Christian Nationalism 101: What is it? And Why Does it Matter?”
In a testament to the degree of alarm over current trends, a crowd of over 275 people packed the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Naples to hear Raushenbush and other speakers try to address those questions.
Though one of just three questions asked by the audience, the question of how Collier County arrived at its current situation was the most pertinent and perceptive of the evening.
It was especially poignant given that 2023 marks Collier County’s centennial year.
How, in ten years, did Collier County, Florida, go from an open, welcoming, relaxed place chiefly known for beautiful beaches, warm winters and a charming downtown, to a Petri dish of political and cultural extremism and intolerance?
This is a county that in the past year has passed a resolution opposing public health measures and an ordinance nullifying federal law. One of its county commissioners has declared there is no separation of church and state. A school board member has called for inflicting corporal punishment on students and purging the county curriculum of ideologies he finds unacceptable. The county school board is expending an inordinate amount of time considering whether to hold a religious invocation before its meetings. School libraries are banning or restricting over 300 books (in compliance with state requirements). The county library has withdrawn from the American Library Association. The county’s state senator and representative are praising efforts to strip local governments of the ability to protect their towns from climate change. And in 2022 its state representative introduced a bill requiring continuous video monitoring of teachers to find those who transgressed ideological lines.
Rev. Paul Raushenbush speaking at the Naples Unitarian Congregation (Image: Interfaith Alliance)
Raushenbush is an ordained Baptist minister and president and chief executive of the Interfaith Alliance, a national non-profit advocacy group committed to American religious freedom. While he was concerned with the rise of the political ideology of Christian nationalism nationally, a panel of local community leaders testified to their own local experiences of intolerance before the packed audience.
Rabbi Adam Miller of Temple Shalom in Naples recounted being berated for his views and Jewishness following a Collier County School Board meeting and expressed alarm at the rise of local anti-Semitism.
Rev. Barrion Staples, pastor of Service And Love Together Ministries in neighboring Lee County, saw a return to a time when history was twisted to serve Christian nationalist ends. He recounted past racial discrimination and compared current attempts to rewrite history to the “Slave Bible” of the pre-Civil War era, which excised all references to freedom or exodus from slavery.
Cori Craciun, executive director of Naples Pride, described how the town’s annual Pride festival was initially welcomed in Naples’ public spaces but after the COVID pandemic was increasingly restricted by local officials.
Kathy Curatolo, a former member of the Collier County Public Schools Board of Education, recounted that, “What has emerged to the dismay of many is the emergence of a one-sided ideology that is being infused into public education,” in Collier County.
Given all this and the question asked at the gathering, the time has come to take a look back at the causes for Collier County’s radical turn, answer the question of how this came about and to discern the direction ahead.
Looking over the past 10 years, six factors stand out as leading causes for Collier County’s extreme devolution.
1. The Trump factor
Any history of Collier County’s radical rightward movement has to begin with Donald Trump. His influence has been intense and pervasive and felt down to the very grassroots of this community.
Before Trump’s 2016 candidacy, life in Southwest Florida was relatively “normal.” Politics, was a peripheral and distant concern for most people. But this single individual unleashed a wave of what he himself once characterized as “hatred, prejudice and rage.”
As a candidate in 2016, as president and after his presidency, Trump made overt expressions of hatred, prejudice and rage acceptable in public discourse. He encouraged those sentiments in his followers. His personal example of rule-breaking, disdain, insults and violent rhetoric infected the crowds that heard him. His division of the world into absolutely loyal, unthinking cultists and “radical” opponents destroyed any middle ground for civil discourse or compromise between differing parties. Though a physical coward himself, he encouraged violence in his followers.
That this impacted Southwest Florida was very clear from the time of his candidacy.
Trump made two visits to Southwest Florida during his 2016 campaign. The region had been largely overlooked during previous presidential campaigns given its low population and its established Republican majorities. In a break with past practice for presidential candidates, Trump held two rallies in the area, one on Sept. 19, 2016 in what was then Germain Arena and then on Oct. 23 at the Collier County Fairgrounds.
The Southwest Floridians who stood four hours in the heat and threatening weather to get into Germain Arena that September were everyday friends and neighbors, some already Trump believers, some curious, some offended by Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark. As they stood in line they were largely quiet, patient, peaceful, and very respectful of the sheriff’s deputies and security officers. A single black man in the crowd was amicably welcomed. A lone protester was left alone and largely ignored. It was a crowd of the kind of people who would come to a neighbor’s aid, who volunteered for food drives and did good works for their churches and communities.
Southwest Floridians wait on line to enter Germain Arena to hear Donald Trump on Sept. 19, 2016. (Photo: Author)
That day Trump brought a message that was by then familiar to national audiences: distrust of immigrants, whom he compared to snakes; attacks on his opponent, Hillary Clinton; resentment toward perceived liberal elites and hatred of the federal government. He was rapturously received by his audience.
When the crowd left after a roughly hour-long harangue, his attitude, behavior and approach had inflamed his listeners. He had given them permission to express hatred, prejudice and rage toward “others,” and stoked feelings of anger, resentment and grievance against the world, with an implication that violence in expressing those feelings was acceptable.
Those feelings and attitudes intensified over the four years of the Trump presidency and culminated in the violent insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
The malign influence of Trump’s personal example could clearly be seen in Southwest Florida during the 2020 congressional race for the 19th Congressional District, the coastal area from Cape Coral to Marco Island. Candidates in the Republican primary tried to essentially out-Trump Trump. They projected paranoia, rage, resentment, extremism and intolerance and broadcast these attitudes in their campaign ads and rhetoric, intensifying existing tendencies toward extremism. They waved guns and threatened opponents. All pledged undying, unthinking loyalty to Trump.
These kinds of attitudes and behaviors continue to this day and found particularly fertile soil in Collier County.
2. The federal factor
Southwest Florida and Collier County are about as far south from the seat of federal government as it is possible to get on the American mainland.
The federal government has very little presence in Southwest Florida. There are some national parks and preserves in the region, there’s the US Coast Guard protecting boaters but otherwise, there’s very little consciousness of the federal government’s existence. Social Security is a federal program that tens of thousands of Southwest Floridians rely upon but they seem to have little awareness of it as a federal presence.
This distance makes the federal government seem like a remote and alien presence. There is a strong belief among a minority of Collier Countians that the federal government is intrusive, tyrannical and invalid, an oppressive “commanding hand” as an ordinance put it, encroaching on citizen rights and privileges. They would like to get federal benefits (Social Security), aid (disaster assistance) and protection (law enforcement, Coast Guard) but without strings, obligations or responsibilities.
There was also fury among local Make America Great Again (MAGA) followers that Trump lost the 2020 federal election. Like him, they clung to his lie that the election had somehow been rigged or stolen and they regarded—and still regard—the presidency of Joe Biden as head of the national, federal government as illegitimate.
This sense of alienation and estrangement increased because of the third factor that led Collier County to its current situation.
3. The pandemic factor
From 2020 to 2022 the federal presence in Collier County suddenly became immediate and pressing as the United States—along with the rest of the world—attempted to cope with the outbreak of COVID-19. The extreme right minority of Southwest Floridians and in particular Collier Countians took umbrage at federal efforts to protect American citizens from a global scourge.
In this they were following the example of Donald Trump. When COVID struck, Trump did not react well. Initially, he dismissed it, said it would “disappear,” called it a “hoax” and minimized its dangers. When it couldn’t be wished away he advocated bogus treatments like hydroxychloroquine and injecting bleach. He discouraged mask-wearing and the recommended precautions from public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
While a minority of Southwest Floridians aped Trump’s responses, they made up in noise what they lacked in numbers. There was ferocious opposition to mask-wearing and to vaccinations when vaccines became available. The kind of rule-breaking and defiance that Trump encouraged also encouraged resistance to public health measures.
Local politicians jumped on this bandwagon, encouraging further rejection of public health protections and defiance of local and federal law.
These factors ingrained a strain of alienation and disaffection in this population and led to a persistent perception that COVID was a sinister, globalist hoax.
Once the pandemic was largely over, their resentment took the form of trying to pass an ordinance that would prohibit future public health mandates of any kind, whether public or private.
A draft resolution for the county laid out the accusations: “federal and state health agencies have demonstrated a clear inability to be truthful, transparent and consistent in protecting the citizens of Collier County,” they “violated” county citizens’ rights “through discrimination based on vaccine status” and subjected county citizens “to death and injury with little recourse” and stopped doctors from speaking freely or treating patients as preferred (i.e., with hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or other unproven and discredited remedies).
While the worst excesses of a proposed resolution were diluted and a similarly-intended ordinance merely re-stated state law against health mandates, the fact was that in 2023 Collier County passed an anti-public health ordinance and then an ordinance nullifying federal law in the county.
The experience of the COVID pandemic in Collier County further incentivized MAGA radicals to continue and accelerate their campaign against the federal government, against constitutional law and embrace the extreme fringes of political logic and practice.
4. MAGA mania
For the past 10 years—and long before that—Collier County’s population was predominantly Republican. Party registrations remained largely stable at 65 percent Republican and 35 percent Democratic.
The Republican coalition consisted primarily of residents whose roots went back to the beginning of settlement of the county around 1920 and relative newcomers, mostly from upper Midwestern states where Interstate Highway 75 originated at the Canadian border. Naples is the southernmost town before the highway turns east to Miami. It’s easy to drive down from Chicago or Detroit and just stop. While easterners settled Florida’s east coast, Midwesterners, many retirees, settled its west coast.
For the most part these people were mainstream Republicans from states like Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. They believed in limited government, restrained spending and a strong national defense. However, they never challenged or attacked the Constitution or the rule of law.
That changed with the onset of Trump in 2016 and his total domination of the Republican Party in the years that followed. In Collier County, as in the rest of the country, non-Trumpers were denigrated as Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) and kicked to the margins. Trumpers took over the county Party apparatus, pushing out or defeating longstanding Republican activists. The entire Party radicalized.
There was some resistance—sometimes lapsing into screaming matches and personal attacks during Party conclaves—but while non-Trumpers complained, they never organized or fought back as effectively as Trumpers. Ultimately, the county Republican Party really became the Trump Party. Personal loyalty to Trump became the yardstick of Republicanism rather than conservative ideas or positions.
This Trumpism has led the Party to keep pursuing extremes in its pronouncements and activities. Infused with Trump’s “hatred, prejudice and rage,” its most fanatical members have descended into anti-Semitism and promoted intolerance in all forms.
Before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, much of the MAGA energy was directed against abortion. After the Dobbs decision last year, that energy turned into a Christian nationalist religious crusade, with county MAGA officials on the Board of Commissioners and the School Board trying to impose religious dogma and stating overtly that there is no separation between church and state.
This kind of Christian nationalism leads to only one destination: the imposition of a state religion, which the Constitution’s founders explicitly sought to avoid. It will also lead to doctrinal conflict as different faiths try to impose their dogmas on public schools and the whole population. This is what happened for 200 years in Europe before the Enlightenment. In the New World, the American experiment began trying to leave that bloody legacy behind.
However, Collier County’s MAGAs appear determined to head down this Christian nationalist path, one that has the potential to pit Catholics against Protestants and different Protestant sects against each other. It has already manifested itself in the seemingly endless and inordinately time-consuming debate over whether to hold a religious invocation prior to the start of county School Board meetings.
At least the only thing being wasted in that controversy is time. History has shown that books and bodies come next.
5. The media factor
Collier County has an extremely weak media establishment when it comes to covering serious issues of governance, representation and elections and provides little to no counterweight to anti-democratic extremism.
The role of the press in a democracy is to provide a check on officialdom, examine official actions, point out wrongdoing or imbalances and provide the public with the information it needs to make rational, enlightened decisions. This was recognized by the Founders at the very beginning of American government. As the Virginia Declaration of Rights put it: “…the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.” A free press was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
In Collier County there is little to no fulfilment of that role by existing media outlets. Only one television station, NBC2, has a dedicated political reporter with that title. In fact, local news directors seem to go out of their way to avoid reporting on anything even remotely political. Otherwise, television coverage focuses on car collisions, canal crashes and potholes, mostly in neighboring Lee County where the stations are based.
But the media fails most spectacularly in Collier County’s own Naples Daily News (or the Naples Delayed News or the Typo Times, as this author prefers to characterize it).
The Naples Daily News is suffering from the same malaise infecting local newspapers across the country. Its revenue base is down as advertisers seek new and more effective media outlets. It has been sold several times and every sale diminished its capabilities and coverage. Its staff has repeatedly been reduced, its deadlines shortened and functions like graphic design and printing assigned to remote locations.
In the past, like most local newspapers, the Naples Daily News published original editorials every day, hosted op-eds from outside authors and featured letters to the editor. It pursued a scrupulously fair and non-partisan editorial policy. However, on June 1, 2022 the newspaper’s management announced that it was dropping the daily editorials, op-eds and letters in the print edition. Instead, it created a tombstone letters page buried in the back of the book that appeared on weekends and then, begrudgingly, on Wednesdays. Cancelation of daily editorials and letters deprived the community of a common forum outside of stovepiped social media platforms.
As a result of this and the general failure of the regional media, important political developments, especially at the margins, go uncovered, allowing extremists to operate in darkness. Also, voters remain uninformed about the actions of the officials governing them and those representing them to higher bodies like the state legislature and the US Congress.
An important source of information for voters is missing in Collier County. The county’s lurch toward unchallenged extremism is the result.
6. The activist factor
A history and analysis of Collier County’s political trends can’t overlook the role of key individuals in shaping its development.
Alfie Oakes at Patriot Fest, March 19, 2022 (Photo: Author)
In Collier County a prime driver is Francis Alfred “Alfie” Oakes III, 55, a prominent farmer, grocer, entrepreneur and far-right activist.
Oakes is Collier County’s very own Trump, whom he strikingly resembles in a number of ways and whom he adores.
“I love our president and his family with every bit of my being! I love all that he has given for our country and all that he stands for!” Oakes posted on Facebook on Dec. 22, 2020 after speaking on the phone with Trump, who was fighting the results of the election. “May God bless our great President Donald Trump, his family, his team and all of the 75 million patriots that support him!”
Like Trump, Oakes is a businessman accustomed to risk-taking—and arguably more successful in his own realm than Trump. Also like Trump, he is known for his blunt outspokenness and broad-brush denigration of critics and opponents. He shares Trump’s affinity for extreme politics, insults and absolutism.
In the same way that Trump initially dismissed COVID as a hoax, so did Oakes who vehemently fought all forms of COVID precautions in his store, Seed to Table, and battled county officials who tried to protect public health through masking and distancing.
In an infamous June 2020 posting on Facebook, Oakes denounced the murdered George Floyd as a “disgraceful career criminal, thief, drug addict, drug dealer and ex-con who served 5 yrs in prison for armed robbery on a pregnant woman, and spent his last days passing around fake 20’s to store owners in Minnesota.” The post sparked outrage and protests throughout Southwest Florida.
During the run up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, Oakes sponsored two busloads of Trumpers to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally on the National Mall and flew up himself the day of the protest. Despite a video purporting to show him inciting rioters to attack the Capitol, Oakes vehemently denies that it was him and says he peacefully protested elsewhere. He blamed the riot on “the obvious six or eight paid actors (used in other events such as [Black Lives Matter] riots, hard to believe they would be that blatant and sloppy) ... followed by a small group of aggressive Trump supporters caught up in the moment, these paid actors lead the charge.”
Just as Trump dominates the national Republican Party, so Oakes dominates the Collier County Republican Party where he was elected a state committeeman in 2020. Through his Citizens Awake Now Political Action Committee (CANPAC), he funded local MAGA candidates for county Board of Commissioners and the school board. They won and are now driving the county’s rightward direction. Although he has tempered his public pronouncements recently he still influences enough of a MAGA audience to determine the outcome of party primary elections, which are usually the deciding ones.
But also, like Trump, Oakes can be mercurial, inconstant, bullying and sometimes illogical. In September 2021 he was demanding a hand recount of the 2020 election in Florida, an election that all parties agreed Republicans had won. The effort got nowhere. He can also turn on former allies: when Kelly Lichter, chair of the Collier County School Board, whom Oakes had backed, had the temerity to vote for a school superintendent Oakes opposed, he called her a “traitor” and sued the school board.
In another similarity to Trump, Oakes has also endorsed clearly unqualified candidates for public office based just on their ideological purity and personal loyalty. “I don’t want to hear about what IQ someone has or what level of education someone has,” he said at PatriotFest, a gathering and rally that he sponsored in Naples on March 19, 2022. “I graduated from North Fort Myers High School—a bunch of rednecks. Common sense and some back is all we need right now.”
Given Oakes’ urging and the backing of CANPAC, these candidates won races for county Commission and School Board.
Oakes has been a significant figure driving Collier County in its current direction.
Keith Flaugh speaking before the Collier County Board of Commissioners in 2021. (Image: CCBC)
Another MAGA activist is Keith Flaugh, head of the Florida Citizens Alliance, a non-profit conservative organization founded in 2008 primarily to influence education. The organization argued that the liberal political trend of young voters was the result of indoctrination in their schools (which presumed that young voters couldn’t draw their own conclusions but had to have been somehow brainwashed).
Flaugh, 77, is originally from Montana where he received his Master of Business Administration degree from the state university, according to his LinkedIn page. After service in the US Army and a career in finance at IBM Corp., he retired to Marco Island.
According to his Facebook profile, (as posted) Flaugh “considers himself US Constitutionalist and is fed up with how our political system has been hijacked by both monopoly parties and the ubiquitous Federal Government. They have bankrupt us morally and financially to the brink of collapse. He is an organizer for Southwest Florida Citizens Alliance and the Florida Citizens Alliance, an Oath Keeper and an active supporter of SWFL 912, the Naples Tea Party, Save America Foundation, Fair Tax, Foundation for Economic Education, KrisAnne Hall’s Constitutional Ministry and Sheriff Mack’s County Sheriff Project.”
Flaugh is an active lobbyist for the causes he supports, frequently speaking at county Commission and School Board meetings. During the 2021 debate over Collier County’s anti-federal ordinance he demanded that commissioners pass the ordinance or resign. Flaugh and the Florida Citizens Alliance have also been active in opposing COVID vaccinations and in denying climate change, opposing measures to manage or prepare for its effects.
Oakes and Flaugh could not have shifted the county in the direction it has gone without the aid of numerous active supporters and followers.
However, their example illustrates the power of individuals and solo efforts in moving a community.
And that’s power that works both ways.
Commentary: Collier County, America and the next hundred years
No political turmoil or conflict is obvious to the visitors who come to Collier County and Naples during the winter season. The shopping malls light their Christmas trees and the season’s celebrations have begun. The stores are open, the beaches are warm and life is to be enjoyed.
However, for those who have chosen to live permanently in Collier County, who think about local affairs and especially for families with children in public school, the stakes are high.
Will Collier County’s next one hundred years be ones of hatred, prejudice and rage? Or will the next century be one of progress, promise and possibilities?
Collier County is not immune from the currents and storms afflicting the country as a whole. In large part these questions will be determined by the 2024 election.
The next year will without a doubt be one of the most significant in American history. The real, true bedrock issue that will be settled if the election comes off as planned is whether the United States will remain a democracy or become a dictatorship under Donald Trump.
There is no subterfuge about this. Trump’s plans are out in the open. If elected, he has stated that his regime will be one of revenge and retribution. He and his co-conspirators intend to destroy all checks and balances and impose an unlimited, unrestricted tyranny on the American people. All the abuses of one-man rule that the nation’s founders resisted and tried to prevent will come cascading forth.
If there’s a Trump tyranny in Washington there will be a similar tyranny in Collier County. Its enablers are already waiting in the wings.
What they don’t seem to realize is just what a dictatorship will mean; they show no appreciation or understanding of history’s lessons. A dictatorship imposes tyranny on everyone.
Last year American women learned what it means to lose a right when the Supreme Court took away their right to choose.
Under the dictatorship being contemplated by Trump, all Americans will lose all the rights they cherish: freedom of speech, thought, worship, assembly, petition, press, property—everything embodied in the Bill of Rights.
For example, under a dictatorship, if Donald Trump decided he wanted to seize and gift Seed to Table to Ivanka or Jared or Barron he’d simply be able to do it and no protest, process or court proceeding could stop him. In a dictatorship there’s no appeal, no reprieve, no redress. That’s what Russia’s oligarchs discovered when Russian President Vladimir Putin gave them similar ultimatums and then demanded half their wealth.
In a dictatorship, especially one based on a personality as sick and twisted as Trump’s, past loyalty is no guarantee of future favor. No matter how strenuous, how complete and how total a person’s subservience to the leader was in the past, any perceived slight or current whim of the dictator can mean punishment in the future.
A microcosmic example of the fragility of past loyalty came in Collier County this year when Oakes turned on Lichter for defying him on the appointment of Leslie Ricciardelli as school superintendent. Oakes had supported Lichter for election to the school board. But when she showed the slightest independence in basing her vote on what she regarded as the most qualified candidate rather than the one he demanded, he branded her a “traitor.” A traitor to what? What did she betray? Certainly not the students, teachers and parents of Collier County to whom she owed her real loyalty.
In a dictatorship any show of independent thought or commitment to a good greater than the dictator is cause for punishment.
That’s the way Trump governed as president—and it will be orders of magnitude worse if he’s re-elected.
Ironically, it’s the example of local MAGA activists that should inspire defenders of democracy to greater action.
Collier County’s MAGAs have shown that individual actions matter; that no act is too small or insignificant to make a difference. For those on the side of democracy, every envelope, or phone call made, or donation can help defend democracy in Collier County and the nation. Activism is the answer and that activism is needed like never before. The most impactful acts of all, of course, are voting, helping others to vote as well and protecting free, fair and accurately counted elections.
Like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings causing a hurricane, every action by every friend of freedom can generate a blue wave that can grow into a tsunami.
Right now Christian nationalism, MAGAism, Trumpism, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamaphobia and a host of other biases and bigotries and the willingness to act on them, potentially violently, are inspiring the kind of fear and concern expressed at the Interfaith Alliance gathering.
But while hatred, prejudice and rage can’t be banished, they can be contained and ultimately defeated. It takes everyone’s courage, commitment and consistency to do it but it’s worth the effort—in Collier County, in America and in the world.
And the willingness of people to take action is a reason to truly be thankful, in this season—and always.
“Freedom from want.” (Painting: Norman Rockwell, 1943)
Liberty lives in light
© 2023 by David Silverberg