By Davis Cobb

davis.cobb@gaflnews.com

THOMASVILLE —  Former lawyer, judge, and TV personality Joe Brown paid a visit to the Thomas County Republican Party earlier this week to rally them in support of candidate Donald Trump.

Members of the Thomas County GOP were given the opportunity the afternoon of Oct. 28 to meet with Brown over lunch as he and a handful of other Republican activists stopped by the organization’s headquarters to light a fire under their constituents in preparation for the coming election day.

Brown was the first African American prosecutor of Memphis, arbiter of the courtroom reality television show “Judge Joe Brown,” and a former judge of the Tennessee Criminal Court. He received national attention for presiding over the final appeal of James Earl Ray, in his conviction for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his subsequent removal from the case during a reopened investigation on account of alleged bias.

Dr. Gordon W. Rolle, Jr., co-founder of African-American and minority-centered Trump support group MAGA Black Georgia alongside his wife Sonia, opened the afternoon presentation by stating his own organization’s goals of galvanizing minority groups to vote in favor of Trump, expressing his belief that the reinstatement of the former president would solve many of the issues and inequities facing those communities.

“Being a Fulton County resident for over forty years, I’ve seen a lot of inequities, a lot of things that were just not right within our own community, run by people that looked just like me and just happened to be Democrats,” Rolle said. “I said, ‘This is something that needs a lot of correction,’ and so when Donald Trump came along, that was my ticket–I saw the light.”

Rolle hoped to form a connection between his organization and the Thomas County GOP, as he had done with local Republican groups in several other counties, with the aim of future collaborations and a sense of unity in their shared goals.

In introducing Brown, he requested the attendees of the rally take notes on his speech, as they would need to be his voice in their local community.

Brown opened by outlining a series of defining events in the history of the United States, including the start of the American Revolution, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the ratification of the Bill of Rights, which, in conjunction with many of the arduous struggles the nation has since endured, had shaped America into a “strong society.”

However, Brown added that this had in turn led to the nation growing content and its leaders “weak,” believing this would lead society to slip back into hardship unless a strong leader like Trump was instated.

He argued that modern Americans had learned to ignore their responsibilities, claiming that they had forgotten what got them “from cave to condominium” in blurring gender roles and placing less emphasis on procreation. Brown cited shopping and navigation as modern examples of the traits women and men respectively had practiced in ancient times for survival, gathering and exploration, and insisted the Democratic party had encouraged Americans to stray from these practices and shirk their responsibilities by being overprotective in their policymaking.

“Some people think that you should remain in some sort of crib from infancy until you die, somebody’s supposed to take care of you,” Brown said. “That is not the way for humanity to advance.”

Brown also expressed criticisms of Democrat positions on border and LGBTQ+ policies, fearing that the lenient border policy to the south of the United States would allow immigrants into the country from places like China, the Middle East, and Africa that he saw as dangerous, and frustrated that rainbows and other LGBT-adjacent iconography was permissible in public schools but religious symbolism was not.

He advocated that Christian imagery should be allowed in public schools, citing it as a current problem with the state of the country.

The former judge stressed that the attendees of the rally before him needed to go and vote in the pursuit of, as he put it, “restoring character” that he believed had been lost due to Democratic influence, arguing that the opposing party lacked character or even a cause.

“When I listen to the Democratic Party today, I don’t hear a purpose or a cause–I just hear, ‘Enjoy yourself,’” Brown said. “But when you haven’t done anything, how can you enjoy yourself, because there’s no sense of accomplishment?”

Following his speech, Brown accepted questions from the audience and was available for photos and conversation.