For several months, a fellow Justice of the Peace, Brian Armas, has been executing a whisper campaign against me to destroy my reputation and erode my support among my peers on the Quorum Court, as well as key individuals in the Republican Party. He has been painting my attendance at an early Black Lives Matter rally in June of 2020 as a sign of support for the Black Lives Matter. You can imagine how Republicans would react to such an accusation from someone like Armas, whom we thought was a man of character.
The message of the whisper campaign (and now an expensive mailer) completely missed all context and implies details that aren’t true at all. A “supporter” of George Floyd and the BLM movement doesn’t show up at protest wearing white pants, a purple plaid button-up shirt, and a tan cross-body purse. An organizer doesn’t make a “supporter” a feature in one of her on-the-spot Facebook live videos. A “supporter” doesn’t get doxxed by the movement.
My back was to an unknown camera operator during my address to the students so he or she couldn’t hear much of my message. Still only a candidate for justice of the peace, Armas, was over 100 yards away so he wouldn’t have heard anything either. That didn’t stop the McCollum campaign team from producing an attack mailer around it.
In the seven years that I’ve served on the Quorum Court, we have maintained a high level of decorum that allows us to exchange differing ideas to find the best solutions to our county’s issues. When JP Armas was planning to run for Benton County Judge, he approached me to convince me to drop out of the race — that I was so valuable as a Justice of the Peace, even though he has already recruited a candidate to run for my JP seat. In fact, Armas had recruited a lot of his own people to run for the unprecedented number of JP seats opening up. Representative McCollum also approached me to drop out of the race a few weeks later.
When he and State Representative Austin McCollum met, they decided that McCollum, who was almost termed out of the state legislature, would run for County Judge instead and JP Armas would run for McCollum’s State House of Representatives seat. JP Armas did not draw an opponent in his safe Republican District and is now the State Representative Elect for that district. He has worked tirelessly installing Austin’s campaign signs, defending Austin online, getting Austin endorsements, and trying to get Austin up to speed on county issues, as well as other key background campaign activities.
This whisper campaign is an act of deceit by JP Armas. He deserves to be censured by the Republican Party of Benton County and replaced on the ballot by someone who will spend their time serving constituents rather than helping their friends get elected to county government. He has proven that he will pursue winning at any cost to anyone. That is not a character trait that voters value. It erodes the trust of all elected officials. The whisper campaign and mailer crossed the line of generally legal campaign opposition techniques. I have not ruled out a defamation lawsuit.
If you want the truth about the BLM rally, click here.
Thank you for you attention to this matter.