BY CASEY EITNER Watch what you ask for

Mark Anderson of Sperryville [“Frazier was in DC to ‘educate himself on issues of the day’,” Letter to the editor, Jan. 21] is absolutely right that freedom of speech and freedom of peaceable assembly are a bedrock of democracy. And if that was all [Rappahannock Supervisor Ron] Frazier was doing when he participated in the events on the Capitol on January 6, no one should have a problem with that.

Mr. Anderson speaks about “apparent irregularities” in the elections. They clearly were not all that apparent to the 60 or so federal and state courts — all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — governors, secretaries of state, lieutenant governors, legislatures and election o cials, many of them Trumpappointed and Trump-supporting Republicans, who rejected the cases presented by the former President and his supporters.

Every case was rejected because there was no or insu cient evidence of election irregularities, or lack of “standing” by the plainti s, to overturn the states’ results. In cases of standing, if there was indeed evidence, why would the Texas Attorney General have to question Pennsylvania's results, as opposed to someone with standing in Pennsylvania doing so? Some Republican state leaders like Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election o cial, went so far as to debunk in painstaking detail baseless voter fraud claims in press conferences and on national television.

So was that all it was, Mr. Frazier just attending a peaceful speech and taking a civics lesson from Donald Trump? Or did Mr. Frazier respond to calls by Donald Trump made over several weeks to attend this event and march on the Capitol on that particular day to forcibly pressure Congress to reverse those democratically determined results?

“Come to D.C. January 6th to ‘Stop the Steal’,” Trump tweeted on December 19, 2020. “Be there, will be wild!”

If that was the case, then we all should have a problem with an elected o cial of Rappahannock

County lending his support to subvert democracy by advancing Donald Trump’s election fraud deception and cancelling — that is, stealing — the votes of millions of Americans to keep his hold on power. Whether Mr. Frazier is censured or not, the stain is there on him and by extension on all of us.

I got a message a few days ago from a friend in Poland congratulating us all on “the triumph of democracy” in the inauguration of our new president. This friend is no ordinary person. In 1981, he was taken from his wife and young children, and jailed and beaten for ghting the communists as a member of the Solidarity movement.

He wrote to me, “All these Trump supporters should be sent to Russia or Belarus, let them see what the lack of DEMOCRACY and FREEDOM OF SPEECH really look like. They can start their journey in Poland too. We hope that also in our country, we will regain democracy and freedom of speech and we will not be ruled by demagogues.”