The silent MAGA Fluids may end Trump; but that's not enough to end our civic war.

If a political force tried to have my friend lynched and then viciously attacked my family for power, I would publicly oppose that force. But I'm a lib, not a MAGA Fluid.

The article linked below gives some additional background on the Saga Stevin campaign of 2021.

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67-33, part 1: Victory, grace, and the path out of our abusive civic household

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A few months after he tried to have Mike Pence lynched in 2021, Donald Trump tried to drive Pence’s family friend, Lakeland’s popular GOP Mayor Bill Mutz from office.

This Trump’s name was Saga Stevin. She was a way more effective campaigner than the actual Trump is today — far more articulate in her lying, much younger/free from mounting rage dementia, and with a cocky, taunting, hateful, kinda charismatic style of campaigning that punched first and sucked all the air out of any shared space she joined.

Saga ran with a January 6th wind at her back, fully embracing the Capitol Lynch Mob in deed and style. She was coming for the RINOs and the libs and for vengeance for lots of strange lies and grievances about a city she just moved to. She was a child of Trump — except better at Trumping, and right in our local faces. She was a MAGA Freak taking power viciously from the MAGA Fluid ruling class that runs Lakeland — and who Bill Mutz embodies at its best. (Full MAGA Freak v. MAGA Fluid explanation here.)

Saga galvanized Lakeland’s MAGA Freak community and absolutely paralyzed Bill Mutz and Lakeland’s MAGA Fluid ruling class for weeks. She took the fight to them in brutal, public, dishonest ways. She took Grady Judd’s endorsement’s from him like a gangster sticking up a kid for a lollipop.

When the MAGA Fluids join the libs, better things happen

Saga’s band of MAGA Freaks — which included a literal criminal convicted of stealing lawnmowers from Habitat for Humanity — attacked Bill Mutz’s family and parenting with gross personal slanders.

None of Bill’s friends or MAGA Fluid political supporters came to his personal or political defense in public; and Saga had all the initiative and energy. Her signs were showing up all over the place.

In this vacuum of public moral leadership, it fell to me, of all people, to aggressively defend Bill Mutz’s family and rally the MAGA Fluids to some tiny semblance of self-interested courage and pushback.

Lakeland’s MAGA Fluids had all rallied around each other to narrowly defeat me in my 2020 School Board re-election because I was too mean or something — too willing to fight for public morality. But they damn sure appreciated that I took the fight to Saga, in confrontational, public, honest ways.

After all, they weren’t gonna do it.

Here’s an example — and it gives you a sense of Saga’s Trumpiness. Note the sexualized bluster about my wife, right from the start. And then note how she crumbles into silence by the end. A barely paper tiger.

In the end, Lakeland’s Libs teamed up with its MAGA Fluids to smash Saga Stevin — to smash Trump, as he tried to seize power in our nice little city through one of his spiritual children. It was a 67-33 MAGA/Trump beat down. For one night, the MAGA Fluids showed what they were capable of doing in concert with the libs to build a healthier civic space.

The MAGA Fluids were fine with pre-January 6th Trump controlling the military and nuclear codes; but they could not tolerate post January 6th Trump as the face of Lakeland city government.

MAGA Fluids don’t do reciprocation — so don’t ask

I publicly savaged Saga Stevin — and then all the Trumps that ran for Polk School Board in 2022 under the guidance of another criminal — for its own sake. It was good. It had to be done. I don’t want MAGA Freaks to have any kind of power over me — or anyone else. They pollute public life with their behavior. And I have learned that they shrink like the mob-joining cowards they are when confronted with relentless moral aggression. I have learned that when you take the moral fight to them; they duck the fight. We have largely purged Trump/MAGA from our civic life in Lakeland — that is, unless the MAGA Fluids bring them back.

Yes, this looming referendum on would-be MAGA dictatorship is really very simple: there are more libs than there are MAGA Freaks. The Libs will turn out to save the country from the hopelessly corrupt dictatorship the MAGA Freaks hope to deliver. The Libs are doing, have done, and will do their civic duty. In Freaks v. Libs, the Libs win.

But it’s not just Freaks vs. Libs.

When the MAGA Fluids join the Libs, you get 67-33 beat downs on the side of good; when they don’t join the Libs, you get would-be MAGA dictatorships.

So this all falls on the MAGA Fluids — the Bill Mutzes of the world. There are enough MAGA Fluids to sway the outcome either way. They — not the Libs or MAGA Freaks — will decide whether we wake up the day after Election Day taking a step toward a just peace or a greatly escalated civic war and daily chaos.

I’m not pessimistic or optimistic about what the MAGA Fluids will do. I’m just fully prepared for any outcome — knowing I have done all that I can do. I’m on the obvious morally right side, as are the Libs and my fellow GOPers who have already joined them.

I have also learned never to do anything for civic or moral reasons with the goal or expectation of reciprocation. MAGA Fluids, particularly, have taught me they don’t do civic or political reciprocation. Frankly, Bill Mutz, who I consider a friend, has taught me that several times in the political space. So I’m not asking the MAGA Fluids to do anything. I’m just watching.

This psychology is not your fault, libs

I did, however, wonder over the last few years if the experience of watching MAGA try to lynch his friend — and then feeling MAGA torment the most vulnerable people in his own family — would lead Bill to some public rejection of MAGA.

I wondered if it would lead to some true expression of empathy (in the actual definition of empathy) for the vulnerable people Trump and MAGA enjoy tormenting. I wondered if the experience of a dirty Lib defending Bill’s family with focused moral aggression might have earned libs writ large some benefit of the moral doubt.

After all, Mike Pence himself finally found the courage to sort of publicly reject the movement that made his lynch mob. I hoped, quietly, without asking, that Bill would do the same.

Lakeland’s very popular, personally kind Christian mayor could have given many other basically decent MAGA Fluids, who look to Bill for moral leadership, permission to do the same. And I have learned that MAGA Fluids need permission to be brave or moral.

Alas, none of that happened.

It’s my understanding, based on my past conversations with him, that Bill quietly voted for Trump twice in 2016 and 2020.

Based on no conversation with him (we haven’t discussed it), I think it’s possible Bill Mutz will either leave his ballot blank or vote against Trump this time. I base that possibility only on my personal experience of his personal kindness and decency. I base it on wishful thinking. It’s hard to believe for a Lib who wants to imagine the best of good people that a person as nice as Bill could pull the lever a third time after January 6.

But Bill’s vote really doesn’t matter that much. His silence has already mattered much, much more. In his public leadership role, that silence tells everybody this:

When Bill Mutz weighs the competing merits of empowering the people who tried to lynch his friend and tormented his family against gratuitously escalating a MAGA civic war with Billy and the Libs that neither of us want, it’s a tough, close call for him.

Libs feel the sting of that sort of realization all the time — as well they should. It’s a bewildering and shattering thing to realize. But I’m well past the bewildering and shattering by now. I figured this out about the MAGA Fluid — and really just humans — a long time ago. It doesn’t faze me.

I know I have zero responsibility for whatever Bill’s hang-up is. It is not my issue to work through. It is based on nothing I have ever done or not done. It’s not your issue either, Libs. You are doing your duty. You are fighting honorably, imperfectly for the decency of your country. That is all that you/we can control.

Do not internalize that moral rejection of you in favor of MAGA lynch mobs. It is not about you. Fighting the actual government consequences that hang-up imposes on us is hard enough without blaming yourself for it. You’re blameless.

If a lynch mob can’t convince somebody, you’re not going to convince that person.

What’s going on behind closed doors on Lake Hollingsworth at MAGA Fluid headquarters?

So here’s a Lakeland vibe check:

In my observation, our most prominent, mostly GOP neighborhoods, have far more Harris/Amendment 4 signs and far fewer Trump signs these days than I would expect. I’ve never seen the balance of presence on Lake Hollingsworth in a presidential election favor the Democrat before. And it does so by a pretty healthy margin.

My neighborhood, between Lake Morton and Lake Hollingsworth, was once a quite evenly-divided purple political space. The presence is sapphire blue today.

As a Republican who has already voted for Harris, A-4, and Lori Edwards, my biggest question is how many of my fellow Republicans — not just here but across the country — will vote for the same basic things.

I don’t have any illusion that the sign balance vibe of Lake Hollingsworth and Lake Morton is determinative of anything. Barring some wildly unforeseen data or social development, Trump is going to win Florida and Polk County.

Still, the palpable lack of enthusiasm is, well, palpable. I wonder what’s going on in MAGA Fluid private spaces. Are they embarrassed to fly the freak flag? Are they capable of seeing Trump as the deteriorating Saga that he is? Can they cast the same vote they did in 2021? That will be determinative for the election in other places.

Yet, barring a much larger Harris win than anyone expects, the election won’t end the daily civic war of the last decade-plus. It’s too late this time around to do it. The MAGA Fluids — Bill Mutz included — had their chance and missed it after January 6th. They could have told their fellow citizens this:

We’re not at war with you. We don’t want to torment the vulnerable among you. We want to share a country and representative government with you in a mutually just peace, the terms of which we’ll hammer out with normal democratic self-government.

Sadly for all of us, they could not summon the courage or morality to do that. If they had, we’d be heading for 67-33 Saga-style rejection of MAGA.

Choosing a path to peace now, in the privacy of the voting booth, is an important and necessary step to avoid escalation of the civic war of aggression that MAGA represents.

But it won’t end the war.

That will take open, public courage. It will take actively offering a public peace. It will take offering decent Americans a real civic choice beyond submit or fight.