Shout out to the woman in North Carolina who unflinchingly confronted a neighbor who was proudly flying a swastika flag outside his home. Paige Braswell, 44, resolved to approach the man after Charlottesville’s domestic terrorist attack. Braswell filmed the encounter and, boy, the homeowner’s reaction is about as surprising as President Trump’s tacit support of white nationalists.
A resident of a Mount Holly, NC, a town 15 miles from Charlotte, Braswell drove to her Nazi flag-flying neighbors house on Sunday; she also shared the man’s address in the video’s caption on Facebook. The video has more than 500,000 views.
“Hey! What’s up with the Nazi flag,” Braswell (far too politely) asked the man who identified himself as Joe Love in the video.
“What’s the flag got to do with you,” Love responded. “What’s it to you? Do you make the payments on this fucking house?”
Braswell inquired why Love was flying a Nazi flag because “this is America not Nazi Germany” (the answer to this question seems self-evident). “Don’t worry about it. You get your ass in your car and get the hell out of here is the best thing I can tell you,” Love answered.
Responding with his own set of questions, Love asked if Braswell flew a flag outside her home. “I fly a rainbow flag, thank you,” Braswell said. Their conversation wraps up, but before Braswell left, Love delivered a chilling explanation for his flag. “I’m not a Nazi either,” Love said. “This is Nazi fucking America.”
As Braswell walked away, Love attacked her. “Take your queer ass on, your lesbian ass on, big fat fucking ass on and go on, bitch.” Braswell, who told The Charlotte Observer that she was straight and married, doesn’t actually fly a rainbow flag outside her home — she hopes to. Braswell also acknowledged that her confrontation with Love paled into comparison to the bravery minorities and the LGBTQ community exude daily.
“They’ve got to be brave every day,” Braswell told The Observer. “There’s no reason I can’t be brave for two minutes. If people are doing it, we need to call it out. If we don’t, it’s just going to get worse.”
Let this be an example for white supremacists who feel emboldened enough to eschew hoods and publicly display their hatred. People will call you out and they might even post your address online.