Peaceful protest march opposes GOP activist recruiting in Kent

KENT — A protest march in Kent went off peacefully on Saturday, April 6, with about 70 people out in the center of town to protest a gathering of about 70 Republicans at the town-owned Community House on Main Street. 

The protest march was organized late last week by Patricia Oris, chairman of the Kent Democratic Town Committee (DTC). She had been alerted that Scott Presler had been invited to give a “voter registration” training session at town. 

Oris said people had started to telephone her late last week to express concern that a speaker was coming to town whom, they said, groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League claim spreads hate speech, especially toward immigrants. 

Free Speech laws

Oris called Kent First Selectman Bruce Adams, who had also been inundated with phone calls. He said he did some research on Presler and also called the town attorney, who said that it would be an infringement on First Amendment rights to cancel the gathering.

The Community House had been booked by a group called the 30th District Senate Republicans, whose chairman since 1991 has been John Morris. Working with him to organize Saturday’s event was Ginny Landgrebe, a Salisbury resident who is a member of the 30th District Senate Republicans.

“We represent the Senate District,” Morris explained. “I am the liaison with the Republican town committees and the state Republican party in the 30th District.”

Kent and most Northwest Corner towns are in the 30th District. Republican Craig Miner has been the senator for the district since 2017; before that he was the state representative for the 66th District. 

Democrat Maria Horn was elected to the 64th District state representative seat last November, defeating incumbent Republican Brian Ohler. 

Horn was actively involved in the march on Saturday, leading a parade through town and speaking out against hate crimes to the protesters.

Scott Presler’s background

Presler is a 30-year-old resident of Virginia who is an active supporter of President Donald Trump and who is known in as an expert at increasing voter registration. A slim young man, he is generally photographed in jeans and a T-shirt, with long brown hair that almost reaches his waist. He is openly gay and uses #gaysfortrump in many of his social media posts. 

Morris said that Presler had been invited to speak to Northwest Corner Republicans about how they could get more people to register to vote. He had been invited to Litchfield County by Lisa Joseph of New Milford, who Morris said, is Presler’s friend. 

The original plan was to have Presler speak in New Milford. Morris said that there weren’t enough large venues in New Milford to hold the crowd of about 100 people that was expected (about 60 people ended up attending the Saturday talk in Kent). 

“We’d used the Kent Community House for an event a few years ago,” Morris said. “It was spacious and a nice facility.”

Oris, the DTC chair, claims that the Presler talk in New Milford but had been canceled because too many people were opposed to him speaking there.

Morris defended Presler, saying, “I wish people would do their research. There’s not a hateful bone in Scott Presler’s body. I checked him out before we invited him here. I looked at his Facebook page, I looked up ACT for America, I had a long conversation with him. Everything I’d heard about him was totally discredited.”

Presler on his www.Reddit.com page describes ACT for America as “the largest grassroots national security organization in the country.” On his Twitter page, #persistence, he posts mainly about his efforts to register new voters and his support for the president.

Oris said she spent “about five minutes on the internet and discovered lots of questionable things about this man. He’s a provocateur, basically.”

Town-owned building

Adams, the Kent first selectman, said he had called the mayor of New Milford to check out the reports that the Presler event had been canceled because of protests.

“He didn’t know anything about it,”Adams said. 

That talk, apparently, had not been planned for a town-owned building, so there would have been no particular reason for the mayor to know about it, especially since it never happened.

Adams had to quickly step in to make sure the planned protest against Presler was peaceful. 

“I wouldn’t cancel the event, but I lined up extra police officers to be in town that day,” Adams said. 

Respect for funeral service

The protesters met up at Golden Falcon Field in the center of town and walked, with signs, to St. Andrew’s Church near the war memorial at the intersection.  The protest was held there, Oris said, so it would not disturb a funeral for a longtime Kent resident that was being held at the same time at the Congregational Church on North Main Street, next to the Community House.

She said that her main objection to the talk was that there are people in town who find Presler offensive and therefore he should not be allowed to speak at a town-owned, taxpayer-supported venue. 

“The people of the town have a right to say who uses their facility,” she said. “The town’s claim that this was allowed to go on because of free speech efforts is simplistic. This group didn’t list Scott Presler on the application, they didn’t apply through open and honest means. With such a controversial character, the town should have had the opportunity to vote on whether this is the kind of person we want in the publicly owned Community House.”

Not a Kent event

Adams said, “I think what’s going to happen is that we’re going to have to institute a policy that we don’t rent town-owned buildings for any meetings of a political nature.”

Oris and Adams both stressed that this event was not organized (or even apparently attended by) Kent Republicans. The only Republican on the Board of Selectmen, Jeff Parkin, had nothing to do with the event and is out of the country at the moment. 

Adams said that the selectmen’s secretary, Joyce Kearns, handles all bookings for the Community House and that he is not apprised of what the space will be used for. Recently, he noted, his own daughter had booked the building to hold a surprise birthday party for him, confident that he would not check the Community House schedule.

‘Quite lovely in the end’

Ultimately, the protest and the Presler talk all proceeded peacefully. Presler posted a comment on his Twitter page, saying, “Thank you to every single person who came to our voter registration training in Kent, Connecticut! The Democrats failed to shut us down. We had more attendees than their protest. This was a win-win.”

Adams and Oris both said the march was well-attended and well-behaved. 

“It turned out to be one of the most inspiring things I’ve done in a long time,” Oris said. “We were out there to say, ‘Hate in any form, anti-immigration, is not what Kent stands for.’ There was a wonderful feeling of love and friendship among the people there. It turned out to be quite lovely in the end.”

Morris said the speech was peaceful and productive and that no one tried to crash the event (which was described as “invitation only”) to try and disrupt it.

Neither Sen. Miner nor Rep. Horn could be reached for comment by press time.