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An Open Letter Responding to Cherokee County Republicans’ Open Letter Demanding Woodstock CAN Retract Its Statements

  • 1 hour ago
  • 10 min read

Mr. Dvorak,


I read your open letter with the attention it deserves. Let me be direct: Woodstock CAN will not retract a single word. We will not disavow. We will not apologize. We stand behind everything we said, and we will explain—with facts, not feelings—exactly why.


Let’s Talk About “Civility”


You call for civility. Civility is the currency of policy disagreements—tax rates, zoning laws, infrastructure spending. What we are witnessing is not a policy disagreement. It is a moral emergency. And your demand for civility is a comfortable request from the side that currently holds every lever of federal power and is using it to terrorize communities, bomb sovereign nations, and kidnap foreign leaders.


As of January 2026, ICE detention recorded its deadliest year in over two decades: at least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, with six more dead in just the first weeks of 2026. Senator Jon Ossoff’s investigation has identified over 1,037 credible reports of human rights abuses in immigration detention since January 2025, including abuse of pregnant women, children, medical neglect, denial of adequate food and water, and conditions so horrific that Amnesty International issued a formal condemnation. At the Fort Bliss facility—now the largest detention center in the country—three people died within 44 days. One of those deaths was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, despite ICE initially claiming it was a suicide.


In Minneapolis, the agency you “God bless” shot and killed Renée Good, a 37-year-old American mother of three, on January 7, 2026. She was sitting in her car. Video evidence—analyzed frame by frame by multiple news organizations—shows she was turning her steering wheel away from the agent when he fired three shots into her vehicle. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey watched the footage and said publicly: “That is bullshit.” Minneapolis police chief Brian O’Hara called her killing “predictable and preventable.” On January 24, federal agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, another American citizen, less than two miles away. DHS Secretary Noem claimed Pretti “brandished” a gun at officers—but no evidence supporting that claim has been verified. A federal judge found that ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota in January 2026 alone.


Nearly 74 percent of people imprisoned by ICE have no criminal convictions. Arrests of people with no criminal record surged by 2,450 percent in Trump’s first year back in office. The administration claims it targets “the worst of the worst.” The Economist called this claim one with “little basis in reality.” Among those detained: restaurant workers, hotel employees, Target cashiers, Native Americans, children, and families.


You ask us to be civil about this. We ask: At what body count does civility become complicity?



The “Peace President” and His Bombs


Your letter speaks of patriotism and faith. Let’s talk about what your president has actually done with the power your party gave him.


In 2025, the United States bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, the U.S. carried out or partnered in 622 overseas bombings using drones or aircraft since January 20, 2025. That is more strikes in one year than President Biden authorized in his entire four-year term. Trump calls himself the “president of peace.” Al Jazeera, the Council on Foreign Relations, and Military Times have all documented this record.


On Christmas Day 2025—Christmas Day—the United States bombed northwestern Nigeria, firing more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles into Sokoto state under a fabricated narrative of “Christian genocide.” CNN reported that residents of the village of Jabo, a predominantly Muslim farming community, said there was “no history of ISIS, Lakurawa or any other terrorist groups operating in the area.” A missile landed 500 meters from the town’s only medical facility. Analysts from the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Crisis Group, and multiple Nigerian officials confirmed that the strikes conflated separate security crises in different regions of the country to justify bombing for the benefit of Trump’s evangelical base. Meanwhile, Trump’s own travel ban blocks Nigerian Christians from entering the United States.


On January 3, 2026, the United States bombed Caracas, Venezuela, in a massive military operation involving 150 aircraft from 20 bases. Delta Force troops seized President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their residence, killing at least 40 to 80 people including civilians, according to the New York Times and Venezuelan officials. A Colombian citizen, Yohana Rodríguez Sierra, was killed in El Hatillo when U.S. forces bombed nearby telecommunications antennas. Trump announced afterward that the United States would “run” Venezuela and take its oil—the largest proven reserves in the world. He did not notify Congress until after the strike. Brazilian President Lula called it “a grave affront to Venezuela’s sovereignty.” China demanded Maduro’s immediate release. The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting.


This is the administration you are asking us to be civil about. This is the flag you are wrapping around your demand for our silence.



On Charlie Kirk and Political Violence


You invoke the murder of Charlie Kirk to argue that words like “MAGA Nazi” lead to violence. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a tragedy and an act of political violence that Woodstock CAN unequivocally condemns. Political assassination is never acceptable regardless of the target. Period.

But your attempt to draw a straight line from our social media post to Kirk’s murder is intellectually dishonest, and you know it. The suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, was a 22-year-old electrical apprentice from southern Utah with no clear ideological manifesto and no ties to any progressive organization. NBC News reported that three sources familiar with the federal investigation found “no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.” One source told NBC: “Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive.” Robinson was registered unaffiliated with any political party and never voted. Blaming Woodstock CAN for his actions is like blaming video games for school shootings—it’s a lazy excuse to avoid accountability for the toxic ecosystem your movement has created.


More importantly, if you genuinely believe that heated political rhetoric causes violence, then you must reckon with what your own movement has wrought. According to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League, every single one of the 61 political killings between 2022 and 2024 was committed by right-wing extremists. From 2011 through 2024, right-wing extremists averaged 20 terrorist incidents per year compared to roughly three from the left. Right-wing violence has killed 112 people in the past decade; left-wing violence has killed 13. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Institute of Justice have all consistently identified white supremacist and far-right violence as the most lethal domestic terrorism threat in the United States. The Trump administration’s response to this data was to remove the NIJ study from the DOJ website days after Kirk’s killing.


You want to talk about dehumanizing rhetoric? Donald Trump has called immigrants “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Those are not metaphors we are assigning to him—those are his exact words, echoing the precise language of 1930s fascist propaganda. As historians like Timothy Snyder have documented, this is vocabulary drawn directly from the Third Reich. When the President of the United States uses it to describe human beings, and your party cheers, you do not get to clutch your pearls when someone calls that what it is.



Consider Who You’re Defending


You write that your members “love the Lord Jesus Christ and this nation.” I will not question anyone’s personal faith. But I will point out what that faith is currently being used to defend.

You are defending an administration whose leader is named over a thousand times in three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein files released by the DOJ in late 2025 and early 2026. Those files include FBI documentation that Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, including four flights with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. One flight listed only Trump, Epstein, and a 20-year-old whose name was redacted. They include an FBI form documenting a complaint from a woman who accused Trump of raping her when she was 13 years old. They include FBI notes from an interview with trafficking survivor Virginia Giuffre, who was recruited from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago as a teenager into Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. They include an FBI memo in which a victim stated that Maxwell once “presented” her to Trump at a party in New York and made clear she was “available,” telling her, “Oh I think he likes you. Aren’t you lucky.” Epstein himself told journalist Michael Wolff on tape that Trump had spent hours at his house with Giuffre, and described Trump as someone whose “moral compass just”—and then trailed off.


Trump fought hard to prevent these files from being released, personally lobbying Republican members of Congress to block the Epstein Files Transparency Act before a bipartisan groundswell forced his hand. When the files finally came out and revealed photographs of Bill Clinton, the White House raced to amplify them. But when the second tranche contained hundreds of references to Trump, the administration’s position suddenly shifted to: “Don’t believe everything you see.” His Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, appears in the files trying to negotiate a trip to Epstein’s island. His top donor, Elon Musk, is in the files asking which night would be the “wildest party.” His Navy Secretary, John Phelan, is in the flight logs alongside Jean-Luc Brunel, a French model scout accused of rape and of providing girls to Epstein. Since the 1970s, at least 28 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, including rape, groping, and walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants.


You are defending an administration that bombed Caracas, killed civilians, and kidnapped a sitting head of state so that Trump could announce he would “run” Venezuela and take its oil. An administration that bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day to perform piety for evangelicals while banning Nigerian Christians from entering the country. An administration that has deployed what the governor and attorney general of Minnesota have described as a retributive military-style operation against a major American city, where federal agents have shot and killed two American citizens, circled elementary schools looking for parents to arrest, and where an ICE officer was captured on video warning a protester that she could “meet the same fate” as Renée Good.


And you want us to be polite about it.



Since You Brought Up Scripture


You cite 1 Corinthians 10:23—“Not all things that are lawful are expedient.” How rich, coming from supporters of a regime that has bombed seven countries, kidnapped a foreign president, and presided over detention camps where people are dying. Let me offer a few other verses your Bible contains.


Jesus called the religious authorities of his day—the ones who wrapped themselves in piety while enabling oppression—a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 23:33). He didn’t offer them a polite dialogue. He overturned their tables in the temple (Matthew 21:12–13). Ephesians 4:26 says “Be angry and do not sin.” Psalm 7:11 says God is angry with the wicked every day. Righteous anger against evil is not only permitted but commanded.


But more to the point: Leviticus 19:33–34 commands, “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself.” Proverbs 31:8–9 instructs: “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”


If you want to invoke Christianity in defense of an agency that has detained a five-year-old child, denied food and water to pregnant women, and presided over the deaths of dozens of human beings in its custody, then I suggest you reread your Bible with fresh eyes. Christ did not instruct his followers to be comfortable. He instructed them to be just.



What We Said and What We Mean


We did not dehumanize anyone. Calling someone a Nazi does not strip their personhood—it identifies their political alignment with a recognizable historical pattern. Dehumanization is when the President calls immigrants “vermin” and “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation. Dehumanization is language that frames human beings as subhuman, as pests to be exterminated. That is what fascist rhetoric does, and that is what your party’s leader does every time he steps behind a microphone.


Calling someone a fascist or a Nazi acknowledges them as a person making a moral choice—and names that choice for what it is. If you support an administration running detention camps where people are dying, where children are being separated from parents, where a medical examiner rules a death a homicide while ICE claims suicide—then at a certain point, the comparison to history’s darkest chapters is not slander. It is accuracy.


You wrote: “We don’t scream in people’s faces or try to do them harm. We are not the left.” ICE agents screamed at Renée Good to “get out of the fucking car” seconds before they killed her. ICE agents circled an elementary school looking for parents. ICE agents followed protesters to their homes in Maine. An ICE officer taunted a protester with the memory of a woman his colleagues had just killed. A federal agent told a woman filming him that she was now in “a nice little database” as a domestic terrorist. Your side is not screaming in faces? Your side is shooting people in their cars and calling it self-defense.


Mean isn’t cruel, Mr. Dvorak. Mean is direct. Cruel is cheering for kids in cages. Evil is bombing civilians for empire and oil. We’re fighting that with every tool we have, including righteous mockery—because as history shows, from Charlie Chaplin’s ridicule of Hitler in The Great Dictator to clowns parodying neo-Nazi marches, laughter strips fascism of the respectability it craves. Politeness enables fascism by normalizing hatred as a “legitimate viewpoint.” We are done with that.



Your Closing Threat Tells on Itself


You wrote: “We welcome and encourage those who do not like the political atmosphere here to leave and find a new home where things are more to their liking.”


This is the language of authoritarianism, not democracy. In a democracy, disagreement is not grounds for exile. Citizens don’t get to tell other citizens to leave because they dissent. That’s not how America works—and the fact that the chairman of a county political party thinks it is tells us everything about the movement he represents.


Woodstock CAN has over 4,200 members in this community. We are spouses, parents, children, business owners, veterans, teachers, and neighbors. We are Cherokee County, and we are not going anywhere. We will continue to attend city council meetings, file open records requests, demand transparency, and call out cruelty wherever we see it. We will continue to document what is happening and to make sure our neighbors know who in their community is cheering for it.



Our Answer


We will not retract. We will not apologize. We will not be shamed into silence by a man whose party tells dissenting citizens to leave their own county.


The time for civility is when we are debating policy. When we are debating whether human beings have fundamental rights—whether children should be caged, whether mothers should be shot in their cars, whether people should die in detention from medical neglect while their deaths are covered up, whether the United States should bomb sovereign nations on Christmas Day and kidnap their leaders to steal their oil—that is not a policy debate. That is a moral reckoning. And history has never been kind to those who chose politeness over justice.


You closed your letter with “God bless ICE.” We close ours with this:


God sees the children in the cages.
God sees the mothers shot in their cars.
God sees the people dying in detention while your party cheers and your chairman tells their defenders to leave town.
God sees the 13-year-old girl in those FBI files.
God sees the bombs falling on Christmas morning.

We’ll be here when you’re ready to answer for that.


Freedom over fascism,

Martha Jean Schindler

Founder, Woodstock Community Action Network

Woodstock, Georgia


 
 
 
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