I've spent my career studying government, and my passion about democracy and self-governance grew from watching my parents show up to participate in the local government of the town I grew up in (its town hall is pictured above).
My parents worked in textile factories. Nobody in my family had gone to college. And still, after a full day of manual labor, at least a couple times a year when town hall meetings were called, my parents would attend those meetings, which sometimes lasted late into the night, to have their say about how our town spent its money (aka its residents' taxes) and what its priorities should be.
That is where I learned that self-governance is not owed to us. It is something ordinary people have to keep choosing to do, even when it's inconvenient.
I continue to study local governments now as a political scientist, and to make sure the coverage of the Beaches governments is non-biased as the publisher of this paper. I have been asked what made me decide to start a paper. My response: that for democracy to work, it needs an informed citizenry.
What Technology Changed
Technological advances have made access to information much easier. It has also created the opportunity for people to be the producer of information, which in and of itself is great. Anyone can now report what they saw at a council meeting, ask a hard question publicly, or organize their neighbors around an issue that used to require a printing press and a mailing list. That is a real gain for local democracy, and I don't take it for granted.
But that same shift removed the friction that used to sit between a thought and its publication. A person no longer has to slow down, find an editor, or put their name to something before it reaches thousands of people. They can post it from a phone, under a pseudonym, in the middle of an argument, and move on.
Unfortunately, at times it can be a Reddit comment calling for elected officials to be executed in the street, posted by someone who will likely never have to say those words to the mayor's face. The same technology that lets an informed citizenry organize itself also lets an angry one skip past the accountability that used to come with speaking in public.
So, when I see that belief, that self-governance depends on people showing up and arguing in good faith, under threat in the community I live in and cover, I think it needs to be said plainly, not buried in a news brief.
A Statement From the Dais
A civil suit was filed against the City of Neptune Beach. That should have led to arguments about the suit itself: its merits, its cost, whether the city handled things right. Instead, a comment posted beneath a local Reddit thread discussing the case called the city's police force, legal staff and elected officials "a bunch of corrupt pieces of shit that deserve to be executed in the street."
Neptune Beach Mayor Bylund read that comment into the public record at the city's September 9 City Council meeting, choosing to address it directly rather than let it pass. She described learning about it during a Sunday church service and texting the police chief and city manager before the service was over. "It made me sick, and it still makes me sick today," she said.
This is what happens when disagreement stops being about ideas and starts being about people. Nobody was debating whether the lawsuit had merit. Somebody decided the people involved deserved to die for it.
When Argument Becomes Something Else
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.
A democracy runs on the assumption that when people disagree, they argue the substance: what a policy will cost, who it will help, who it will hurt, whether it's legal, whether it's fair. That kind of argument can get loud and it can get personal in the sense of mattering deeply to the people in it, but it stays productive because everyone involved is still arguing about the thing itself.
The moment an argument becomes about whether your opponent is a good or evil person rather than whether their idea is right or wrong, it stops being a democratic argument. It becomes something else, and violence is a natural endpoint of that something else, whether or not anyone acts on it. A call for public execution over a civil lawsuit is not an escalation of the argument. It is vilifying and removing the humanity of those the poster disagrees with.
A Year of Political Violence
This week marks one year since conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a Utah college campus, and he is far from the only political figure targeted over the past year and a half, from every point on the political spectrum.
In June 2025, a gunman fatally shot Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, and shot and wounded state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, in what Gov. Tim Walz called a targeted political assassination.
That spring, a man broke into the Pennsylvania governor's residence and set it on fire while Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside, telling police he "harbored hatred" for Shapiro.
This fall, a Minnesota man was charged with offering a bounty for a sitting U.S. attorney general, and a pardoned Capitol riot defendant was arrested after allegedly threatening to "eliminate" a sitting House minority leader.
Researchers who track political violence counted roughly 150 politically motivated attacks in the first half of 2025 alone, nearly double the same period the year before.
None of this is a one-party problem. It is a country-wide habit of reaching for violence, or the threat of it, when an argument gets uncomfortable.
Nobody Wants the Job
Bylund said the hostility directed at Neptune Beach officials has already had a measurable effect: fewer people are willing to run for office there. Of five council seats up for election this cycle, only two drew a contested race; the other three will be filled without opposition in December. "This abuse is public, and it has created an environment where people apparently think that death threats are okay," she said. "They're not okay."
Jacksonville Beach has seen this pattern before. This year, all three of its district council seats went unopposed. The prior cycle, when the city's at-large seats were up, every race was contested thanks to a targeted effort to make sure voters had a choice when picking their local representatives. That effort mattered, because the cycle before that, in 2022, when district seats were last on the ballot, those races went uncontested too.
The lack of people willing to represent their community is not unique to the Beaches. Princeton University's Bridging Divides Initiative, which surveys local officials nationwide with CivicPulse, found that 76 percent of local officials reported reduced willingness to engage in at least one key political activity because of hostility, the highest rate the survey has recorded, with 43 percent specifically saying they're less likely to run for re-election and 42 percent less likely to run for another office because of it.
Researchers tied the recent spike directly to the string of high-profile attacks in 2025, including the killings of Hortman and Kirk and the arson at Shapiro's residence, and found harassment of local officials rose 9 percent in the first half of 2025 over the same period the year before. Women officeholders reported the sharpest impact, with 83 percent citing reduced willingness to engage in key civic activities.
Local officials elsewhere point to plainer reasons too: the time commitment, the pay, social media backlash and a general decline in civic participation. But the fear is real, and it is measurably keeping qualified people off the ballot.
The Pew Research Center has tracked a sharp rise nationally in how each party views the other, not on the issues, but as people. In 2016, 47 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of Democrats said they viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans. By 2022, those numbers had climbed to 72 percent and 63 percent. That is not a shift in what people believe about policy. It is a shift in what people believe about each other.
The Job of a Local Paper
A local newspaper exists to interrupt that pattern, or at least to try. Our job is not to tell readers what to think about a lawsuit, a budget, a zoning decision or a mayor's statement. It is to put the facts of that lawsuit, budget, zoning decision or statement in front of readers accurately enough that they can argue about it themselves, with their neighbors, based on shared information rather than rumor or the angriest comment in a thread.
That only works if the reporting itself stays out of the business of deciding who the good guys and bad guys are. The moment a paper starts covering local government as a battle between heroes and villains instead of a set of decisions with real trade-offs, it stops being useful to the community it serves, and it starts contributing to the exact problem this editorial describes.
That is the real difference between what we do and what shows up in a social media feed, a blog post, or a Reddit thread. Those platforms let anyone publish anything, instantly, with no editor and no obligation to check whether a claim is true before it reaches a thousand people.
A local paper verifies what it reports before it runs, corrects the record when it gets something wrong, and stays accountable to the community it covers because it has to keep showing up in that community, week after week. That accountability is not a formality. It is the entire reason a reader can trust what's on this page in a way they can't trust an anonymous comment making the same claim.
There's also another difference, less visible but just as real.
Most of what actually matters in local government is what most people would consider boring.
A budget line item, a stormwater easement, a routine zoning variance, none of it is designed to make anyone angry or excited, and none of it is going to go viral. We report it anyway, because that dry, unglamorous material is what your tax dollars actually fund and what your city council actually spends most of its time on.
We are a nonprofit. Nobody here is paid based on how many people click a headline (or even paid at this point), so we have no incentive to dress up a dull story as a scandal or manufacture outrage where none exists.
The platforms that thrive on anger and engagement do have that incentive, which is part of why the loudest, ugliest comment in a thread gets amplified while the actual substance of a lawsuit or a budget vote gets ignored. Boring and dry is often just another word for true, and true is what we're here for.
None of what happened in Neptune Beach this week is a policy debate that got out of hand. It's a reminder of what we lose when disagreement stops being an argument and starts being a verdict on someone's worth as a person.
Mayor Bylund's statement, the quiet erosion of contested elections here and nationwide, the string of attacks on officials from both parties over the past year: all of it points to the same thing, a shared civic muscle we've let atrophy.
But that muscle can be rebuilt, and rebuilding it is the reason this paper exists. The Beach Gazette was designed to be independent, fact-based, and community-centered journalism for the Beaches, free for anyone who wants it and accountable to the people who read it.
That's not a slogan. It's a daily choice to report the dull budget line alongside the difficult city council statement, to put our name and a correction policy behind every story, and to trust readers with facts rather than tell them what to feel about those facts.
Neighbors who disagree can still build a stronger Neptune Beach, Atlantic Beach, and Jacksonville Beach together, as long as somebody keeps doing the unglamorous work of giving them the same set of facts to argue over.
That's the job. We intend to keep doing it.
