The Trump campaign has had its fair share of bad press over the election cycle, and it doesn’t appear as if that pattern is going to change any time soon. The most recent cause for alarm came during the 161st Bloomsburg Fair. The fair is an annual event in Pennsylvania, and it includes hundreds of vendors all selling their wares to the happy fair-goers. However, one of those patrons came across a particularly deplorable vendor with a stock of items that made her jaw drop.
The vendor was a man with white, stringy hair and a grimace of perpetual anger. His selection included a number of flags, including those of the Confederacy and the Nazi party. He also had a number of signs that read ‘Hillary For Prison’, and the man was wearing a shirt that showed his support of Donald Trump. Chloe Winters, the visitor who noticed the man, couldn’t believe what she was seeing. This man was actually attempting to spread hate at a fair by selling symbols of slavery, fascism, and dictatorship.
Winters took to Facebook to chronicle her experience, as is the standard current tradition. She wrote that she can’t believe how much hate is still left in the world, and that those flags were nothing but symbols of death, destruction, and genocide. She continued on to say that she would no longer patronize the Bloomsburg Fair if those are the sort of vendors they feel comfortable allowing to operate in their grounds.
The vendor was later identified as Lawrence Betsinger, and it turns out his illicit behavior doesn’t cease with offensive flag sales. He has also been convicted of over 20 counts of child pornography possession, yet the man seems oblivious to the truly horrible nature of his act. When interviewed by PhillyMag.com, he claimed that he didn’t do anything wrong, and that all he did was ‘download some shit on the internet’.
In response to the complaints from Winters and several others who witnessed the old man trying to sell his symbols of hate, the Bloomsburg Fair decided to have Betsinger removed from the fair grounds. It is still unknown how the registered sex-offender was able to get permission to sell his items in the first place, but sources indicated the man was not honest about what he would be selling when he approached the fair about being a vendor. Presumably, he also didn’t share the fact that he was registered as a sex offender at the time of his application.
The most disturbing part of this story is that Betsinger refuses to place any blame on himself. He doesn’t understand why people would make such a big fuss over his flags, saying that he wasn’t forcing anyone to look at them or buy them. He asserted that his First Amendment rights were being infringed by the fair for their ‘censorship’ of his behavior and products. He could not reconcile his own actions with the emotions of those around him, or he simply doesn’t care enough about others to do so. In other words, it was their fault for being offended, not his fault for being offensive.
This is, unfortunately, the typical attitude of the standard Trump supporter. If you don’t like the way they do things, it must be your own fault, because they can do wrong. This man purposefully attempted to infiltrate what should have been a fun environment with his message of hate, yet it surprised him when fair-goers wouldn’t just ignore him and let him continue to be horrible in public. And somehow, in his twisted mind, he ended up as the victim.