One, Cecil’s Dodge Ram, had a massive “Make America Great Again'' flag mounted in the back, while the other, Pettus’s F-450 Super Duty, had an even larger “Don’t Tread On Me” flag. Jerry, Pete, Cecil, and Pettus were gathered around a couple of trucks, both of them decorated heavily with conservative bumper stickers. The sun was setting on top of the hill by the Holiday Inn where you could look over much of the town and see parts of I-75. The survival rate was 98%! Why was everyone so scared? Luckily, this was the type of town that wouldn’t shut things down for no reason, or make anybody wear masks. After the incident, Jerry stopped going to meetings as often.īut when the pandemic hit a few months later, however, he couldn’t avoid it-he was furious about the “China Virus” and all the fear-mongering.
“But some science says white people are just smarter!” LouAnn yelled across the dining room table, “Those IQ tests were racist to begin with! And they don’t take education or money into account! Schools in the USA don’t get enough money in poorer areas! That’s junk science, Jerry, and you know it!” Her quiet, churchy family was unaccustomed to such heated debates and didn’t get involved, but afterward Jerry saw them staring at him and whispering to themselves. “I’m not saying people are worse because they’re not white,” he insisted. During Christmas 2019, they got into a screaming match over IQ and race. He had certainly stopped connecting with his wife and her family. That’s about the time when he got involved with the SaveOurTown group and met Pete, Pettus, and Cecil-Jerry wanted somebody to connect with on politics. At first they tried simply not discussing politics with each other, but she started moving toward the center, disgusted at the GOP’s transformation, while Jerry continued to move further right, even agreeing with white supremacists at times. As Jerry fell in love with the MAGA movement, and later the QAnon movement as well, LouAnn didn’t really approve. Though she had been fairly conservative when they got married, she didn’t like Donald Trump very much while Jerry had fully hopped aboard the Trump Train.
His wife LouAnn had left him over a year ago. Jerry was a car salesman in Cleveland, Tennessee.