Ryan Armstrong sat on a park bench in Downtown Jackson Saturday evening.
It had been a long day for him, but productive.
Earlier in the afternoon, he led a protest, part of which happened not far from the bench on which he was sitting and talking about the day.
"I'm a local guy - grew up in Lexington," Armstrong said. "I was brought up in a Christian home and made to believe the Republican way of looking at things.
"The first time I could vote in a Presidential election, I voted for Mitt Romney because I thought President Barak Obama had death panels and his healthcare plan would bring America down because that's what I was taught to believe."
Armstrong said his beliefs changed when he went to college in Memphis, got a different look at the world and the need for certain social programs in areas of higher population.
"And I met people who were different from me, raised differently than I was and had different beliefs from what I had," Armstrong said.
That experience in college caused him to change his views, and by the time Donald Trump was elected President the first time in 2016, he no longer considered himself Republican.
"Social programs like public transportation, welfare, help for the homeless, those places are needed in areas where a lot of people are in need," Armstrong said. "And now we've got a President who plans to take away funding for a lot of those programs, and what are the people who are dependent on those programs supposed to do.
"Meanwhile, he's surrounding himself with oligarch billionaires who will bow to him just to keep their position of power and keep their cash flows coming in, and he'll take care of them as long as they bow. Meanwhile, the working class is paying for everything he wants done."
It was on the night Trump won election when he was watching one of Trump's celebratory events when Trump supporter Elon Musk stood at a podium and seemingly gave what appeared to be the Nazi salute similar to what Germany's Adolf Hitler expected from his loyalists in the 1930s when he was trying to take over Europe and eradicate the Jews.
"When I saw that, I said I've got to do something to stand up to this," Armstrong said. "I don't know how much attention anyone in Washington will pay to Jackson, Tennessee, but if for nothing else, I wanted to set up a protest just to see who else would show up with a likeminded mentality so that we could all know we're all here and support each other.
"Plus, I've got a young daughter. At some point down the road when we're looking back on this time, she will ask me what I did to oppose this, and I don't want to tell her nothing."
So about 50 people showed up to Conger Park Saturday afternoon for the March Against Fascism. They stood along the side of Highland Avenue for about an hour, holding signs, chanting and making their voices heard to those who drove by.
They then marched down Highland to Downtown for a protest at the Madison County Courthouse and Jackson City Hall before marching back to Conger Park in Midtown.
"I'm grateful and proud for everyone who showed up today because a lot of networking went on today," Armstrong said. "I know we're in Tennessee and a lot of people voted for him, but there's a lot of us here who know what he's doing and are preparing to do what we can to stop the fascism."
Armstrong defined fascism as an "authoritarian ideology that seeks to emulate a mythical past of a country."
"'Make America Great Again' harkens to this cohesion with the majority of our culture with the white culture and protestant work ethic values," Armstrong said. "Those are hallmarks of fascism, and they're tying right wing policies with it."
Armstrong said he has a lot of friends in the LGTBQ community that are concerned about moves the Trump administration could make in the next four years that would make their life unnecessarily more difficult, and the aggression he's pushing in having Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to send illegal immigrants to their home countries and separating them from their families.
"He talks about all the bad people that come over, but very few illegal immigrants are the 'bad people' the President talks about," Armstrong said. "They don't deserve to be treated like that, and hopefully more and more people will join us in these marches and protests.
"Because this is the first. We will have more."
Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news