After being allegedly assaulted by a Trump hater last month, California Republican congressional candidate Rudy Peters commented in an interview with The Epoch Times on Oct. 20 that we are all Americans.
“Exercise your First Amendment right, the freedom of speech, but don’t turn to violence,” said Peters in the interview, as a message to Americans who are still angry about the result of the 2016 presidential election.
Peters is the Republican candidate for the 15th congressional district in California, and he supports President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign. Peters reported that he was assaulted on Sept. 9 at a booth at the Castro Valley Fall Festival.
Peters said that the case has been in progress in court. He said that what he found interesting was that the suspect’s mother was a member of the Democratic Club of Castro Valley.
On the afternoon of the assault, the suspect’s mother and the club had a booth in the festival, and her booth was on the same street block where Peters’s was. Peters wondered if the suspect had been with his mother and her club’s booth before the assault.
Peters said that neither the incident nor Maxine Waters’s (D-CA) message about pushing back against Trump administration officials has discouraged his campaign. He has continued his door-to-door activities just as he did before the incident.
He believes that his messages can reach out to all of his constituents, including Democrats, independents, and Republicans.
However, Peters said that he reduced the number of volunteers around him while he was in front of the public. He said that he had his wife and his 13-year-old child there on the day of the assault, as well as a blind volunteer helping at his booth. The incident made him start thinking about the safety of his helpers.
“I am very upset at Democratic leadership for their not stepping up and denouncing this kind of [activity against Republicans],” he said.
He said he felt sad that Americans have become divided by party. He urged all elected officials to stand up and be united against violence.
In Peters’s campaign messages, he said that he seeks to use federal funding to have police officers working on school campuses to protect students; he would use federal funding to build more care facilities for homeless people with mental health issues; and he wants to widen roads to ease rush-hour traffic. Peters mentioned that traffic at the intersection of I-580 and I-680 has been causing delays for many years and needs to be fixed.
Peters said that many people from his district have been taking long-distance and time-consuming commutes on a daily basis to work in Silicon Valley. He wants to work with cities and counties in his district to come up with new policies to attract high-tech industries to relocate from Silicon Valley to District 15.
Peter wants to bring in federal funding to help some local technology companies to develop environmentally friendly biodegradable materials to replace plastic materials, saying that such technology already exists.
If elected, Peters wants to take the lead in Congress to prevent countries such as China and Russia from stealing U.S. technology.
Peters is running against Democratic incumbent Eric Swalwell, who has recently been considering running in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
