The mall administration clearly will not be winning any public relations awards anytime soon. This area of the country is HEAVILY conservative Republican. Johnson City is a college town so it may have a few more liberals or hippies around.
Anyway, the mall adminstrator interviewed on the local tv news said they approached Fuchs and told him TO SELL MORE PRO-OBAMA MERCHANDISE or face eviction. They actually tried to blackmail him into selling stuff that he didn’t want to sell. Do it, or else.
I don’t dispute that the mall has to have some control over the products its vendors sell, but to try to force a vendor to sell a product he doesn’t want to sell is totally un American. It is fascism.
I lived in nearby Bristol for a couple of years, and even though Johnson City is largely Conservative, there is a sizable liberal minority there, mostly transplanted gays who moved there during the AIDs epidemic to get treatment from East Tennessee State University, whose College of Medicine was one of the big eastern AIDs research centers in the mid-1990s.