My MAGA Experience at a Polling Place

by Arthur Brill

Little more detail on the incident at my polling station in Beaverdam, Virginia.

Beaverdam is a one-stoplight district. It has a post office and one convenience “general” store. It is about 30 minutes from Ashland, the closest incorporated town in Virginia. This puts it at about an hour outside of Richmond.

When my wife and I arrived at our polling station, a precinct with just over 1,300 voters), we could hear a man yelling at the volunteer staffing the Democrat party table.

He was wearing a MAGA hat and screaming something about Democrats being evil. As he came toward us and passed us he said something to the effect of “Don’t talk to Democrats about abortion.”

I responded, “Don’t talk to me about abortion.”

He said, “I guess you ain’t a Christian.”

I replied, “No, I’m not.”

Then he said something about me going to Hell.

When we got to the table, we spoke with the volunteer and she was very grateful for us stopping. We went to vote and when we came back out we spoke to her again. At that point, a huge gust of wind came and blew over the Republican tent. I helped them set it back up using some of the campaign signs for tent stakes in the feet of the tent.

On the way back home, I was thinking of how I was assaulted at the Amanda Chase rally in Ashland in 2020 and how insane some Hanover County residents can be.

So, after we got home I packed some food, packed some tent weights, and went back up to keep the volunteer company.

She was gone when I got there, but I sat with the next volunteer. I was told it was really hard to get people stationed out there because people are freaking afraid. After all, everyone knows that Hanover County residents can be insane.

So I stayed through the next shift when two more volunteers showed up. Turns out, one of them is friends with my wife, and we had some great conversations. She texted me a few days ago to see if I would volunteer at the tent but I never got the text. Apparently, it’s an iPhone-Android communication issue, and she made a joke about “green people,” which is an iPhone texting technical thing. “Green lives matter.”

In any case, there was only one more belligerent person who was asking us if we supported the monuments being taken down. It occurred to me afterward that she might have been speaking to me directly because she saw me at previous rallies.

Apparently, both of these people should have been reported because this behavior is illegal.

I had an interesting conversation with the other volunteers about how Hanover County was not like this 20 years ago when we moved here. It changed in 2008 when Obama was elected. The Tea Party sprouted here as a racist reaction to having a black man in the White House. Hanover County boasted Eric Cantor and Dave Brat. As speaker of the House, Cantor gave Hanover County very high visibility and supercharged the Fringe. By the time Trump came around, we had a busload of insurrectionists go to Washington on January 6.

The KKK has recruited in their robes at the Hanover County courthouse. The self-proclaimed president of the KKK who lived in Hanover County was arrested and convicted for running his car into a protester in 2020.

The Tea Party continues to put up huge, gaudy, yellow and black billboards at the entrances to the county trying to intimidate Democrats from moving here because they’re terrified of losing in elections. They’re the kind of people who are fine with America being a democracy as long as they are in the majority. But as they realize they are losing that majority demographic, suddenly America is not a democracy but some sort of whacked-out biblical republic, as new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson called it.

One of our candidates for the Board of Supervisors who was just defeated the other night spouted some crap about preserving so-called Judeo-Christian values.

One of our school board members sent an internal email about preserving biblical values in the schools.

As I said to the school board in response to that, we are not a Christian nation. Virginia is not a Christian commonwealth. And Hanover is certainly not a Christian county.

The fact that these jerks try to intimidate people and assault them because they can’t handle diversity and becoming a minority just gives me more energy to get back out there and confront their sorry asses.

Does this mean every Hanover Republican is rude? Not by a long shot. But there is an adage if you’ve got six people sitting at a table with a Nazi you’ve got seven Nazis sitting at a table. These extremists must be disowned.

Feel free to share.

End rant.