In a post on the cumbersomely-titled “North Carolina Truth Seekers/Formerly Lee County Truth Seekers” Facebook page, Republican Kirk Smith on Thursday took a page from President Donald Trump’s playbook and declared the media “an enemy of the people.”

Smith, who served a partial term on the Lee County Board of Commissioners in the mid-2000s and again from 2012 to 2016, is seeking election to the body again this year. On Thursday, he shared an article to the meme sharing page moderated by a handful of local Republicans from anti-Muslim website JihadWatch.org which claimed that a Minnesota newspaper failed to adequately cover damaging information about an Islamic candidate for Congress.

“Yep!” Smith wrote. “The media is an enemy of the people, filtering out only news that supports progressive democratic socialists and ignores Islamic Supremacy!”

Smith’s language is directly lifted from Trump, who faced a backlash Thursday from newspapers across the country for his role in undermining the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Not long after Trump first used the phrase, a gunman killed several journalists at a Maryland newspaper.

Smith, of course, is known to readers of the Rant and Lee Countians for being given to conspiracy theories and controversy in general. In addition to years upon years of letters to the Sanford Herald targeting homosexuals, environmental activists, and others he’s also been known to pick fights with high school students, recommend that low income kids be fed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at school for lunch, blame county staff for his own false and defamatory statements, and bring race into a discussion about parking at Lee County High School. He finished sixth out of six candidates in his 2016 campaign.

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