By james art When Harley Walker put up the first Trump sign on his front lawn in 2020, the neighborhood dismissed it as a bad organ transplant. Days later, someone walked up to it, ripped it out, and replaced it with a new sign.
It read, “NO WHITE HOODS IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD.”
Walker was shocked. He wasn’t racist. He spent his career as a DJ mixing a diverse mix of genres into his shows. He voted for Obama.
But he wasn’t surprised. The shameless disrespect, the constant assumptions—after all, that’s why he left the Democratic Party.
That night he ordered 50 more Trump signs. When they arrived, he strung them all over the neighborhood: intersections, telephone poles, and the surrounding streets.
“I think they got the message not to mess with my signs again,” Walker said.
***
Walker lives in Durham, one of the most Democratic counties in the state, and his particular district—the 36th Ward—is among the most Democratic in Durham. Less than a fifth of District 36 voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Walker is a red dot in a sea of blue.
In some ways it blends in with the rest of Durham. He is 61 years old, with a slightly drawn-out Southern drawl and an eager smile. He lives right off the Martin Luther King Parkway. He is gay.
But on his street, a wide leafy street with large lots and ranch-style homes, he stands out. It’s not just the many purple “Catholics for Trump” signs proclaiming his election outside the neighborhood of Harris supporters, or the full-sized American flags and Trump flags blowing in the wind at his flagpole. His neighbor Mercy lives across the street. She is black. She points to the other homes around him. “They’re black, they’re black, they’re immigrants,” she said.
“He’s surrounded by minorities.”
***
Walker grew up steeped in the conservative values of Roanoke, Virginia. He felt that the Republican politics of his family members were too reprehensible – so he became a Democrat in spite of them.
Also, there was the gay thing – in the 1970s, Republicans were much less tolerant of homosexuality than they are today. It was a deal breaker.
Still, he was a proud Southerner. His great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy. Walker says that when he was young, he didn’t know anything about racial tension — he just knew that this flag was part of his family history.
In middle school, he volunteered as the flag boy in charge of unfurling and folding the American flag. He still remembers the precise technique — “13 folds for the 13 colonies!”
Walker moved from Virginia to Durham in 1989 to work as a DJ at the famous queer nightclub Power Company. He spent his free time going to raves and befriending an eccentric mix of music producers. He posed for the cover of his ‘Have Harley, Will Travel’ mixtape in a skimpy leather outfit, boys and all. He belonged to the counterculture.
After leaving that job, he worked in retail and is now retired.
Today, he spends his days operating model trains, maintaining his collection of over 6,000 records, and following the news on social media or Newsmax, a conservative website/TV channel that promotes and later withdrawnconspiracy theories about Trump winning the 2020 election. He visits his mother in Florida for a week every month. He lives alone.
His house is a museum of his diverse interests. On one wall is a Jesus shrine with a nativity scene lined with multicolored lava lamps. His miniature Christmas tree (year-round) is covered in Confederate flags and LED lights that blink to the beat of his music.
Walker, a jovial man with a bushy white beard, wears a baseball cap on his head and a gun on his hip. He did not want to be photographed for this story.
***
His move to the political right began with a series of grievances.
He says he was fired from the nightclub due to complaints about his broad music selection by his boss and a drag queen, an incident he still resents to this day.
When liberals cry about LGBTQ+ rights, it comes back to that moment. “I don’t want to be grouped with all the other letters,” Walker said. “I’m just G.”
He also thinks race is brought up too often these days. As evidence, he cited an incident when he was working at a local store and a black woman called him a racist for not accepting a used item for return. He had seen real racism, he thought, but that wasn’t all.
He had fled a political party because it had been too quick to judge before. Now he was pushed in the opposite direction for the same reason. And he felt that being gay was no longer an obstacle to conservatism: “All the bigots died,” he explained.
***
Mercy, who asked that her last name not be used, lives across from Walker with her husband, Thomas, and their 5-year-old daughter. The couple are in their thirties and work for a corporate events company founded by Mercy. Their house sits at the end of a long, tree-lined driveway—a contrast to Walker’s bold street display.
Mercy meets Walker at a neighbor’s housewarming party. By all accounts he was wonderful.
But when a few months later she says she saw a Confederate flag outside his house, his charm no longer matters.
“You can be the funniest and most attractive person ever,” she said. “But when you decide to draw that line in the sand, even when you know the names and faces of all the people around you, that tells me everything I need to know.”
She didn’t argue with him and neither did the rest of the block, she said. But their silence is just suffering.
“There are many things that go unsaid but are deeply felt,” she said.
She feels it when she sees the non-white workers he hires to do his yard and electrical work toiling under his high-flying flags. She feels it when she sees her neighbors’ children in their front yard playing next to his field of Trump signs.
Mercy is from Washington. At first her city girl instinct was to say something. But Thomas, a lifelong Southerner, kept her calm. It’s better for him to keep his head down and mind his own business. You don’t grow up black in the South without learning to pick your battles.
After 12 years in North Carolina, Mercy agrees. She admits that Walker is set in his ways.
“The older the wood, the harder it is to bend.”
***
Walker says he voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, but grew to resent the Democrat during his second term. He cites various transgressions: Obama says the police in Cambridge acted “stupidly”, Michelle Obama is reportedly scoffing at the meticulous way the American flag is being treated. “That was huge for me,” he said. (However, it’s unclear whether the incident actually happened. A Google search for “Michelle Obama American Flag” and other options turned up nothing.) Walker was also disturbed by the words of Obama’s pastor “Damn America” in the church.
It’s hard for a proud American like Walker to ignore when stories like this keep popping up. What kind of leaders resent the country they are supposed to represent?
For someone who says he avoids “the news” (“Too many lies!”), Walker keeps up with current events. He scrolls to X, where he follows Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. He listens to Trump rallies on the Right Side Broadcasting Network. He frequents Joe Rogan’s podcast on Spotify. And when he turns to television, it’s usually Newsmax. The channel relies mostly on opinion, boasting programs such as The Right Squad and Gorka’s Reality Check.
When Walker explains his views, he sounds like the media he consumes, relying on anecdotes that are hard to verify and out of step with mainstream news consumers.
But whatever details sealed the deal for him, Walker sees a political left that has lost respect for its country.
“I haven’t changed,” he insists. “The Democratic Party has changed.”
Maybe it’s just a matter of getting older, he admits. Maybe he is wood that is too old to bend. In a sense, he remained firmly rooted in the values that surrounded him in Roanoke. But knowing this is not enough to make him sway in the winds of progressivism.
“It’s just too much.”
***
His front yard, with its signs and flags, suggests he’s a die-hard Trumper. But he insists he does not idolize the former president. “He’s not my friend,” Walker said. “Trump supporter is only about 5% of who I am.”
Keeping the signs is not really about Trump, he says, but about his freedom of speech. Take them down and he’ll hit the neighborhood with 50 more.
Still, Walker thinks Trump’s path is a noble one: He’s a billionaire, has been president before, and has twice been the target of an assassination attempt. “I would retire if I were him,” Walker said.
Personal insults initiated his shift to the right; national discontent cemented it. Walker may be a rebel on the surface, but he’s a loyalist at heart. Strip away the experimental music and neighborhood arguments, and you’ll find the same studiously flag-folding high schooler he’s always been.
From Walker’s point of view, the left is burning the flag while Trump is willing to die for it. And for him this is the important thing.
Top photo: The American flag and the Trump flag in front of Walker’s house. Photo by Sophie Buckminster – The 9th Street Journal