I was punched at a Donald Trump rally. His message of hate caused the violence

I don’t bear Tony Pettway, the man who sucker-punched me when I was peacefully protesting at a Donald Trump rally in Tucson last week, any ill will. I think he was just caught up in the moment. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him; his career in the air force is already going to be messed up.
What happened to me is a tragedy that comes straight from Donald Trump. He created the situation where people come and protest at his rallies because of what he says; he tells his supporters that “in the old days the protester would be taken out on a stretcher”. He says that he’d like to punch a protester in the face. He offers to pay the legal bills of somebody who punches a protester. Pettway is responsible for his own actions, but it’s Trump’s violent, hateful message that is creating this situation.
In a way, what happened afterwards was worse. By the Sunday after the rally, I woke up with these crazy viral stories about me online. I had messages of support from around the world, but also immense amounts of hate and lies being spread about me.
Trump had lied about me on George Stephanopoulos’ show on ABC after the protest. He said I was a professional agitator, and the rightwing blogosphere immediately followed it with a half-dozen articles.
They said I must have used a racial slur to incite Pettway to hit me. They said I assaulted him first – despite the clear video evidence that I did not. They said endless things about me; that I was a plant of George Soros, or the Bernie Sanders campaign, or the Hillary Clinton campaign. None of those things are true.
The online reaction has been intense and unrelenting, completely divorced from any reality or facts. People spread every vicious rumor they could come up with.
I quickly learned to tune out everything that was being said about me. It was fantastically weird; intensely weird. I was entering a deeply foreign reality.
I didn’t seek out getting punched. I made a peaceful protest, protected by the first amendment to the constitution, and when I was asked to leave, I left. It was as I was leaving that they tried to beat me to death.
I feared for my life inside that convention center. I got lucky – if my head had hit the concrete, or a metal bar or whatever, it could have been much worse.
I certainly hope that this is the end of the violence at Trump rallies. But he didn’t – and hasn’t yet – disavowed all this violence. He went on TV the very next day and said “we don’t have any problems”. It was ridiculous. If he doesn’t deal with it, it’s going to get worse. What happens next? Is somebody going to die?
People have asked me: why did you go down there and disrupt their rally? Don’t they have the right to meet and talk about anything they want? But sometimes, when you have someone who is trying to grab power for themselves, you have to look them in the eye and call them a liar – that’s what I did.
I hesitate to think – it’s a thought that comes from the darkest part of my psyche – that the place was teeming with people who wanted to beat me. Most people aren’t violent. Trump supporters are good people; This is not a me vs them thing – it’s a me vs fascism thing.
I don’t want to be an angry person. But nobody deserves having a violent attack on them because of a political protest. Nobody should have to deal with that; none of us. This is America. That’s not how we roll.
But people are going to have to make themselves heard. It’s not enough just to vote. I feel it’s important for people to make their voice heard peacefully through protest – always peacefully. Donald Trump’s supporters are very motivated. To those of us that are afraid of what his presidency might portend, I suggest that we start taking him as seriously as he himself does – which is very seriously indeed.