At the beginning of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors work session on Wednesday, Board Chair Jon Green noted that it was Constitution Day, the annual national commemoration of the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1789 by the members of the convention that drafted it.
The work session was also happening one week to the day after the murder of rightwing political activist and co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah, while he was speaking at Utah Valley University.
The work session focused on issues including the county’s juvenile justice system, emergency funding for Shelter House, aspects of the county’s participation in nationwide lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, rural economic development, monitoring structural problems of the county’s current jail building and the appropriate inmate-housing capacity of a proposed new jail facility. Kirk’s name never came up during the more than three-hour work session, even though Johnson County had made national headlines over the weekend because of Chair Green’s decision not to lower the flags at county buildings to honor Kirk’s memory.
Just hours after Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday, Sept. 10, President Trump ordered flags at all federal government facilities, including military bases and embassies, to be flown at half-mast until Sunday night. (The flags would have been lowered anyway on Thursday, to mark the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.) Trump admired Kirk for his strong support of Trump, including Kirk’s promotion of Trump’s lie about winning the 2020 election, as well as other baseless conspiracy theories the president endorses.
Like other governors, Gov. Kim Reynolds then ordered flags at state properties be lowered “as a mark of respect in memory of Charlie Kirk … in conjunction with President Trump’s proclamation to lower the United States’ flag for the same amount of time.”
At Johnson County buildings the flags were lowered on Sept. 11, but not for Kirk. Green explained his decision in a statement posted on social media on the night of the 11th.
On my personal authority as the Chairman of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors, I have determined to defy the Governor’s order that our colors be at half staff through Sunday on behalf of Charlie J Kirk.
I condemn Kirk’s killing, regardless of who pulled the trigger or why.
But I will not grant Johnson County honors to a man who made it his life’s mission to denigrate so many of the constituents I have sworn an oath to protect, and who did so much to harm not only the marginalized, but also to degrade the fabric of our body politic.
Johnson County flags will fly as usual. I will accept any consequence, whether legal or electoral, for my decision. It is mine alone.
Even before Kirk’s death had been announced after the shooting, his supporters, including elected officials, were denouncing anyone they felt was being insufficiently respectful towards Kirk and his work, even when people were just quoting public statements made by Kirk. The vehemence of those denunciations grew after Kirk’s death was reported, and references to Kirk’s life’s work that weren’t sanitized were dubbed “disgraceful” or worse.
In an essay published in Vanity Fair this week, Ta-Nehisi Coates examined what people need to forget or ignore in order to hail Kirk as an embodiment of American virtues, as Trump and others have. Kirk built and sustained his career as a political activist by trafficking in racist and misogynistic tropes, as well as slur-filled anti-LGBTQ activism — with a particular focus on undermining the rights of transgender people — and even going so far as to invoke the xenophobic and antisemitic “Great Replacement Theory.” But as Coates points out in his essay, that sort of forgetting and ignoring has happened in America before when it is politically expedient, such as the decades-long amnesia in much of the country about the real nature of the Confederacy and the antebellum South that propped up the Jim Crow era.
Green understood the sort of anger and likely online frenzy, including serious threats, his decision would provoke.
“I was cognizant of that,” he told Little Village in an interview after the work session. “But just as much, I was pretty clear-eyed going in that people are hungry — starving — for principled leadership against the rising fascism in this country. So, I thought it was a decision worth making, a stand worth taking.”
As news about Green’s decision started spreading through social media and news stories, he received an avalanche of emails and voice messages.
“Things really started cooking around 11 a.m., Friday morning,” Green said.
Early Friday afternoon, Gov. Reynolds, who was still in India with a trade delegation, weighed in with a post on social media: “It’s disgraceful that a locally-elected official has chosen to put politics above human decency during a time like this.”
The governor’s plea for “human decency” referred to showing respect for Kirk, not for showing respect for the people he built a successful career by maligning.
“At the onset on Friday, it was probably 90-10 against, and some of them quite significantly against,” Green said. “By midday Saturday, I think this community especially started to see how big of a ruckus it was generating, and the tide really began to change. By Saturday evening, it was 50-50.”
“And since Sunday, I’d say it’s been 10-90 in our favor.”
There were some photos of the flag at the Johnson County Administration Building at half-mast posted online Saturday, leading to some people claiming Green had backed down. He hadn’t.
“There’s no security posted at the flagpole, obviously, so on Saturday, merry pranksters were coming by every couple of hours, putting the flag down, and then our facilities folks would put it back up,” Green said. “That’s how the photos ended up floating around the internet.”
On Saturday night, Green posted a message on social media summing up his thoughts on the frenzy surrounding his decision.
There’s something I need all of you to understand, especially fellow electeds: what I have done cannot be exceptional. I ask you to consider your oath. Don’t leave me out to hang.
I am taking a mountain of shit right now. I can’t go home and I can’t be with my partner. If nothing changes I will be satisfied in my decision, but Christ I hope I’m opening room for some folks to be brave.
Green said he had received messages of support from other Iowa Democratic officials.
“The support that I hope to have from other Democrats isn’t an endorsement of the decision that I made, but a recognition that it was ours here at Johnson County to make,” he said. “Every January, one of the first formal actions that every Board of Supervisors takes, going back for years, is officially empowering the chairperson to determine Johnson County flag protocol.”
“I appreciate that recognition; even if they disagree with the decision, they acknowledge that it was ours to make.”
Green said the reaction he’s gotten locally in Johnson County has been “overwhelmingly positive.” And a lot of angry reactions appear to come from people completely unacquainted with Johnson County.
“I think we have heard from every other Johnson County in the country, as they have been catching flak,” he said. “These keyboard warriors on the internet didn’t do even enough due diligence to recognize what state they needed to talk to.”
The supervisor said he is working his way through all the emails and voice messages.
“The outpouring, both positive and negative, has been overwhelming. It’s probably going to take me the rest of my term at the end of next calendar year … When I last looked, I’ve got over 1,800 emails, my phone has been buzzing nonstop,” he said. “From about 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. on Monday, at my desk I was getting about three voicemails a minute.”
“I want to do the best I can to respond, especially to my constituents, but it’s just going to take some time to work through that backlog.”
The only mention of the flag decision at Wednesday’s work session came during the public comment period, when Clara Reynen took the podium to talk about the number of inmates the proposed new jail should be designed to accommodate.
Reynen, a University of Iowa grad student and candidate for the Iowa City Council in the November election, said before addressing the jail issue, “I just wanted to thank Supervisor Green for not lowering the flags last week.”
Reynen said it was “a really, good symbolic way to demonstrate care for the trans and queer communities. So, I thank you for that. I think it went a long way with folks in my community.”
Supervisors cannot respond to speakers during the public comment period.
Green’s decision came up again during the public comment period at the Board of Supervisors’ formal meeting on Thursday. Three speakers addressed it, all three denouncing Green’s actions. The three were, in order of appearance, Donald MacFarlane, vice chair of the Johnson County Republican Party, Teresa Bumgartner, chair of the Johnson County Republican Party, and William Keetle, former chair of the Johnson County Republican Party.
All three reminded the supervisors that Johnson County is in a state whose politics are controlled by Republicans. MacFarlane and Keetle also said they were upset about a social media post Green published last week, hours before Kirk was shot.
They did not, however, cite the second post in that two-post statement.
MacFarlane called on Green to resign. Keetle acknowledged that local officials have the right to make decisions regarding flag protocol on municipal property and said he and his fellow Republicans would work to have the Iowa Legislature strip local officials of that authority.
“Apparently there is no statute requiring a county to cooperate,” Keetle said. “This is something that we will try to remedy in the next session of the legislature.”
Last week was not the first time Green made an independent decision about the lowering of flags in Johnson County. After Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered in June by a gunman who also shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette — and had a list of other Democrats he was apparently targeting for assassination — neither President Trump nor Gov. Reynolds ordered flags to be lowered. Green did.
“When the governor failed to extend that honor that time, I felt that we had a moral responsibility to take a stand here,” Green said.
