Last week’s meeting of the Rock County Board was ugly.
But there was beauty among the ugliness, in the form of residents and board members, conservatives and liberals alike, who defended board member Brian Knudson.
Knudson had come under attack. Flyers accused him of supporting child sex trafficking. The accusation was absurd. But that didn’t stop people from harassing Knudson and his family.
Shame on these pamphleteers. They slandered a good man and spread an anti-democratic virus.
This virus attacks civility, reason and goodwill, replacing them with hate, fear and anger. These last three qualities are great if you want to sway voters and increase campaign contributions. But they are destroying our country.
This episode began with new county board member Mike Zoril of Beloit. Zoril has been disrupting board meetings with attacks on the likes of the local curling club and YWCA. He often grills county officials about spending. That’s his job, but he wastes everyone’s time at board meetings when he could easily get answers if he just picked up the phone and asked someone in the county administration.
Zoril has not been connected to the flyers, but whoever produced the flyers supported Zoril’s resolution, which deplored illegal immigration and child sex trafficking. Who would oppose that? But board members, sick of Zoril’s tactics, said, yes, these are crimes, but let’s get back to regular business.
“Oh my! Our county board supports child abuse!†That was the reaction of the people who printed the flyers. Did I mention they didn’t have the decency to sign those flyers?
A few people speaking at the board meeting were horrified to hear what the anonymous flyers told them. They seemed to think the rest of us don’t know what a horrible problem child trafficking is.
Lisa Burnside, town of ÌÇÐÄVlog´«Ã½, said she doesn’t think people realize that “there are a lot of pedos, everywhere, including government workers.â€
Anyone who follows the news knows that pedophiles exist in all parts of society. But Burnside singled out government workers.
“Pizzagate is real,†Sue Ryan of ÌÇÐÄVlog´«Ã½ told the board. She was referring to a thoroughly investigated and debunked lie from 2016, which accused Democrat elites of trafficking in children, using a Washington, D.C., pizzeria as a front.
Ryan said members of the military-industrial complex, police. foreign governments and a church in Rockford, Ill., all traffic children. She said children face satanic rituals, draining of bodily fluids and cannibalism. More absurdity.
Neither Zoril nor his supporters appear to have looked into how our local governments fight child abuse. They could have asked. They would have learned about the Rock County Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force, which includes 17 agencies, all working on the problem. But they wanted to score political points, not improve our community.
We can do better than this kind of political circus. We can be more like those at the meeting who stood to applaud Knudson. What a great, American moment.
We need more moments like that and less—much less—of the vicious lies trickling down from national levels to our own county board.
