The author addresses the Democracy Under Siege forum in Naples, Fla., on Oct. 5, 2024.
Oct. 17, 2024 by David Silverberg
On Oct. 5, 2024 Southwest Floridians gathered for a forum titled “Democracy Under Siege: The Fascist Threat to Florida and What To Do About It.”
The forum, held at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples in Naples, Fla., was sponsored by Floridians for Democracy, The Lincoln Project, Florida Veterans for Common Sense, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Greater Naples, Choose Democracy, and The Paradise Progressive.
Speakers were Rick Wilson, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, who joined the gathering remotely; Dale Anderson, a Sarasota-based pro-democracy activist and advisor to Choose Democracy Now; and David Silverberg, founder and author of The Paradise Progressive blog.
The full 2-hour program can be seen on YouTube.
The author’s 22-minute speech is presented here. It focuses on the threat to democracy in Collier County, Fla., the greater danger of “fasco-Trumpism,” ways individuals can defend democracy, and the importance of elections in general and this year’s election in particular.
The author’s 22-minute speech. It can also be accessed on YouTube.
Thank you very much for that. My name is David Silverberg and I want to talk about here in Collier County and what’s been going on.
First of all, I’m going to take a little quibble: We don’t have Fascism as it was defined in Europe; we do not have a Fascist Party by that name here in Florida. We don’t have a movement that’s Fascist with a capital “F.”
What we have is a lot of fascistic development both here in Florida and here in Collier County, I’m sorry to say, but I’m going to really draw that distinction.
And I’m also going to use a term called “fasco-Trumpism” because, you know, it’s fascistic and we know that when we say fascism we mean it in a generic sense: it’s authoritarian, it’s dictatorial, it’s oppressive, and, of course, we have Donald Trump who has unleashed all this in the world.
By the way, I googled “fasco-Trumpism” and it’s nowhere on Google so we’re hearing it here for the first time.
Here in Florida, we have “Trump-lite,” the man “where charisma goes to die” as Rick Wilson put it, Governor Ron DeSantis, who, by the way, as we all know is a total creature of Trump; he would not exist on the political stage if Trump had not endorsed him in his race for governor and got him through the primary and he is—as Dale very ably showed—is trying to coordinate across the state, its culture, its society, this anti-woke fasco-Trumpist culture.
But right here in Collier County we’ve had some disturbing trends and I’m sure you’ve all been following them and the chief evangelist for this is our very own Francis Alfred Oakes III, whom we all know as Alfie.
When you look at it the similarities between Alfie and Trump are really remarkable. They’re both businessmen, they’re both bombastic, they’re both mercurial, they’re both fanatical in their ways, they’re both fasco-Trumpists, MAGAs. Alfie once got a phone call from Trump and thinks he’s just about God.
And before I go further on Alfie—and it’s not entirely focused on Alfie—I want to make clear that I don’t hate this guy. I have met him. I did an article on him for a magazine called Mother Jones. He sat down with me, we had a two-hour interview, he was gracious, he was cordial, he was—I think—forthcoming and truthful where I think it was in his interest. If the guy stuck to food and groceries we all—and he—would be a whole lot better off.
But Alfie has his opinions and he is absolutely entitled to those opinions and he’s entitled to express those opinions. I support that. But we are entitled to respond and react to those opinions and to his actions—and it’s the actions that really count.
And one other thing, just to cover my backside—he is a public figure. Alfie is politically active, he is a state committeeman in the Collier County Republican Party, so his actions are subject to scrutiny, criticism and analysis.
Having said that, he has tried to impose a fasco-Trumpist ideology on Collier County and especially, on the Republican Party in Collier County.
He won as a state committeeman in 2020, he ousted a guy named Doug Rankin, he was riding on his defiance of COVID protocols in the midst of the panic and the pressures of the pandemic and he pretty much took control of the Republican Executive Committee here in Collier County, the REC, or, as I prefer to call it, the Wreck. And between the Wreck and his own political action committee, Citizens Awake Now, CANPAC, he succeeded in altering the political balance here in Collier County.
Now, in 2022 he put up three candidates for the school board and two candidates for the Collier County Commission and he won all his races, which was an achievement, if you want to use that word. But as a result, we have in Collier County a very fasco-Trumpist agenda and the Commission and the School Board have moved in that direction—although there are changes in the school board.
When you look at what our Board of Commissioners has passed, they passed a federal nullification law, the so-called Bill of Rights Sanctuary Ordinance, which says that Collier County has the right to nullify federal law, to not obey it if it considers it unconstitutional, which is really going to come back to bite this county, which I can go into detail later.
They’ve outlawed mask and public health mandates. They passed what was a very, very, very critical anti-public health resolution that got watered down but that anti-vaxx, anti-COVID, anti-mandate, anti-public health effort is very much promoted. Fortunately, the ordinance, the law, that has penalties that they passed, duplicated state law. State law says that you can’t have mask mandates anymore so this says the same thing so it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
Like Sarasota County, they withdrew the county from the American Library Association.
Then, last month, they passed an anti-Amendment 4 resolution. Now, that doesn’t have the force of law but it was a start, here in Collier County, of a movement to have counties come out against Amendment 4 and a woman’s right to choose and we saw it just passed again in Lee County, so it is moving along. I don’t know how many people it’s going to influence to go against Amendment 4 but they did that.
Then, weirdly—and I have to admit, I did not see this coming—they voted to end fluoridation in Collier County’s water. So now all the kids can get cavities and they can make more work for local dentists, and Alfie will protect his pineal gland, which he was worried about.
And, by the way, everybody who buys toothpaste has got to look for that fluoride because you’re not going to get it from the water in Collier County.
Let me also point out—and this came up in our interview—he says, Alfie, that he owns 3,000 guns, that he can arm every employee at Seed to Table and in 2022, he was addressing a group and he said, “I’m all in. We don’t want to talk about what that is”—meaning that if he didn’t like the way the 2022 elections came out he might launch an armed revolt, he said “but we have to be all in.”
Well, the ’22 elections came out very well for him so we all live under law and order.
Now, all this is very menacing and he was moving to further extend this in 2024 but something very, very interesting happened and it happened this past August on August 20.
There was a revolt! There was people who had enough of Alfie and Alfie fasco-Trumpism and MAGAism here in Collier County and the people who revolted were all the Republicans. The Republicans in their primary repudiated the Alfie-MAGAs for all the different offices that he was proposing.
Alfie didn’t care about anybody’s qualifications, in fact, I heard him once say in a speech, he said: “I don’t care what a person’s IQ is, or what their education is, all I need is some back and common sense.” So he’s looking for fellow fanatics and he had them up for two school board seats, he had them up for county commission—all three were incumbents but he really wanted to get rid of Burt Saunders in the 3rd District. And, of course, he wanted to get rid of Melissa Blazier as supervisor of elections; that was a very dangerous one, and the county assessor.
At that point he had reached a point where the Republicans said, “no!” Especially in the technical offices like Supervisor of Elections where expertise is really important and you have to know what you’re doing, even Republicans had had enough. And Collier County, and I hope you appreciate it, is a pretty well run county. This place functions and it functions very well. Maybe Steve Bannon will call it the “deep state” but I’ll call it the “deep county” and it works for us. And had he gotten these other people in, it would not have.
Now, there was one position that he did win, a lawyer, and she is now a committeeperson on the Wreck, and she was the one who drafted this anti-federal nullification law, which in 1821—1821!—in 2021 (it might as well be 1821!) when she did it in 2021, our own David Millstein characterized that law as “proposed by someone who doesn’t know constitutional law.”
But she won her election as state committeeperson.
So why is this revolt, this little revolt among the Wreck, so significant?
Well, I think it’s significant because it shows that there is a line, there is a point beyond which this kind of fasco-Trumpism becomes oppressive even to those people who adhere to these party principles—and these are the folks that Rick Wilson was talking about. These are people who still think, people who are thoughtful. They’re very conservative, I mean, have no doubt about that, but they know fascism when they see it and they didn’t want any part of it. And they responded with a fundamental American patriotism and belief in freedom and liberty and they expressed this at the voting booth and all those MAGA candidates lost.
And, by the way, Alfie got disqualified, of course, because he didn’t fill out his papers properly and so he is off the Wreck and Doug Rankin, who he deposed in 2020, is now going to be head of the Wreck. He’s a very conservative guy, he’s been a conservative Republican, I think, since the womb, but he is not Alfie’s Republican.
So, my hope is that the same kind of revulsion and the same kind of revolt and the same kind of discontent with this kind of fasco-Trumpism is abroad in the land. And Rick will get the percentage of Republicans who have had enough, they will vote for freedom and liberty but, you know, we have to remain vigilant.
Now I want to talk about the “what we do about it” part of this presentation.
Remember something: even after this election, as Rick Wilson pointed out, there are going to be attempts to negate what happens, to overturn the results, and Florida, Lord knows, has a record of passing constitutional amendments that the legislature and the governor then ignore. We’ve got to hold their feet to the fire.
But there are maybe three broad principles that we can follow.
One is vigilance. We’ve got to be on top over everything these people doing. As Dale mentioned, one effort that is truly fascist—and Fascist with a capital “F”—is the attempt to make this a one-party state. And there have been those attempts.
Christian Ziegler, who was chair of the Florida Republican Party before he got deposed in a sex scandal, once said that: “For the Republican Party of Florida the work continues as our job is not done until there are no more Democrats in Florida.”
This is not competition. This is extermination. And that is a very, very bad trend. There was one bill proposed last year that would have decertified the Democratic Party in Florida. It wasn’t serious. It didn’t advance but it shows a mentality and we have to be especially vigilant to that. We have to be a multiparty state because we’re a multiparty society.
Our media plays an essential role in this and I have to say that I have been disappointed by our local media, I don’t think they keep track of these people, they don’t emphasize the political threats that are out there to the degree I wish they would. This is why I started The Paradise Progressive blog, which I hope you’re familiar with, or will be familiar with afterwards. It’s trying to fill the gap that I see in our political reporting from our traditional media. We’ve got a good reporter in Dave Elias, who’s very active on NBC2 but he can’t do it alone. We all have to be our own monitors, own Minute-people to keep track of these kinds of loony ideas like getting rid of fluoride and do it when it’s coming up.
You know, they passed an anti-immigrant law last year. That law went through subcommittee, it went through committee, it went through the legislature in its entirety—and this is a statewide law—and then Ron DeSantis signed it into law and then suddenly the protests start.
I’m sorry, that’s not when you do it. You may be mad about the law but you’ve got to be active when it’s being formulated, when it’s on the table.
That brings us to the second pillar, which is response. You’ve got to respond. Be vigilant and when you see something bad you’ve got to respond.
Here in Collier County that means contacting our Board of Commissioners and even if they don’t listen, even if they vote against it, they need to know there are people who are watching what they do.
There have been statements in the Collier County Commission…[Commissioner] Chris Hall [R-District 2] once said, “something is out there,” he couldn’t understand why there was all this protest against it. It was because he put it out there! It was a loony law that he wanted to do and everybody saw what it was and they protested. And it does have effect. And that also applies to the congressional level and we can get into our congressman some other time.
But you’ve got to be vigilant, responsive and the third pillar is activism.
You’ve always got to be active, it doesn’t end with the election, it doesn’t start with the runup to the election; the day after the election we’re going to have to be active.
As Michelle Obama said to the Democratic National Convention: “Do something!”
Look, none of us are going to take up arms. I’m pretty sure that no matter what happens none of us are going to go out and shoot up a firehouse or something like that.
We all know what the traditional things are: making phone calls, canvassing—which, by the way, is a great exercise. It gets you to meet all your neighbors, talk to people. Writing postcards. All of these are democratic norms.
I want to add another challenge to everybody.
Since social media is now our preferred, most common use of communication, I want to challenge everybody here to reach out to ten people you have never met, never contacted, and don’t know and try to convince them to your point of view whatever that point of view is, if you think that’s important. Ten people you don’t know. You’ve got to get outside of your bubble. You’ve got to talk beyond your friends. Lord knows, there’s plenty of feeds and all sorts of things. There’s all these nice Chinese ladies who want to get to know me, I could talk to them.
You can reach out to people you’ve never talked to and never met and do it on social media. You can do it at home, you can do it at any hour, you can do it unprompted, when you’re relaxing or taking a bath or whatever. But try to reach out to people and that’s really important. It’s especially important for this election.
Now, all my recommendations are based on the premise that we will have a democracy; that our laws will function, that you can do these things, that it’s legal, that it’s protected.
If we lose democracy we lose everything. I think everybody in this room knows it.
Today, as Rick pointed out, is 30 days to the most important election of our lifetimes, of our children’s’ lifetimes and our grandkids’ lifetimes.
I don’t have a grandchild who’s ready to vote yet, but she will be affected by what we do here next month.
It brings up to me what I consider one of the most meaningful elections that ever occurred—and that occurred on September 11th, 2001. All of us in this room remember that day.
It was an election held in the back of an airplane, United Airlines Flight 93
We know what had happened. Al Qaeda hijackers had taken over that plane, killed the pilot and the co-pilot and there was one standing outside the cockpit threatening to blow up the plane with a bomb.
The passengers went into the back and they had to decide what to do. They knew that other planes had hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. They didn’t know where they were headed.
And so what did they do? They took a vote. They held an election. They held an election because that’s what we as Americans do.
When we are faced with a decision, when we are faced with a course of action, we take a vote. There was one passenger, Todd Beamer, who said, “OK, let’s roll.” And they voted to try to take back that airplane.
Nobody said the vote was rigged. Nobody said that there had to be a hand count of ballots. Nobody said that there was a secret landslide that no one had seen. And nobody said that they weren’t going to accept the results of that vote. Because that’s not what Americans do, not what real, patriotic Americans do and that’s not what those passengers did on that airplane.
They took a vote, they acted on their decision.
Now, the plane crashed. They fought for that cockpit and ultimately it crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
But by their action they may have saved the United States Capitol. They may have saved the White House. Who knows how many American lives they saved?
Let me tell you, I was on the ground in Washington, DC on 9/11, my wife was working at home, my son was in a high school next to the CIA. We were all saved by those people—as a result of their election.
Now, today, we have hijackers again. We are the passengers in the back of that plane. And these people are trying to take that aircraft into darkness and dictatorship and disaster. And we have got to get control of that aircraft.
And on November 5th we will hold that election and I hope—and I hope that we will all work and I certainly intend to—to make sure that we get that airplane under control and we land it safely in a free democracy.
So, that is one month from today. Each of us has something to do.
So, let’s roll.
Liberty lives in light
© 2024 by David Silverberg