In an affront to freedom of speech, both the Dyker Heights Golf Club and the Brooklyn Republican Party today pulled the plug on a scheduled fundraiser featuring former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka and President Donald Trump‘s son, Donald Trump Jr.
The cancellation follows a mass campaign from both the mainstream and left-wing edge of the Democratic Party, who sources say put heavy pressure on management of the golf club to cancel the fundraiser, and put up fliers in at least one local public school denouncing the event and promoting protest against it.
Gorka is a former editor of the right leaning Breitbart News and a current contributor to the right-leaning Fox News. He is painted among mainly left-leaning media and Democrats as being Islamophobic and anti-Semitic. He might be and he might not be. From what I’ve read, I’m not sure, but he is certainly not advocating a mass genocide, incarceration or other dangerous extreme involving either Muslims or Jews.
But either way, both the golf club and the Brooklyn GOP caved to the pressure.
“Out of an abundance of caution, focused on fairness to a venue that has been unfairly targeted by those who wish to deny others their First Amendment rights, the Brooklyn GOP event scheduled for mid May at the Dyker Beach Golf Course will not be held,” said Brooklyn GOP Spokesperson Michael Tobman.
“It is truly unfortunate that opponents of free speech, those who have appointed themselves unelected arbiters of what’s appropriate for our shared civic conversation, have forced this decision. Politics, even in an election year, must be more civil. We should be able to disagree without being disagreeable or abusive. The Brooklyn GOP looks forward to holding its event at a different time and place,” he added.
City Councilmember Justin Brannan (D-Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach) commended the owners of the Dyker Beach Golf Course for deciding not to host the event.
“I know it’s not easy to turn away business but they made the right decision and we should all thank them for it,” Brannan told a reporter.
Also leading the charge to stop the fundraisers were local Democratic senate candidates Andrew Gournardes and Ross Barkan, who both also utilized the fundraiser to score political points in bashing incumbent State Sen. Marty Golden (R), whom they are both trying to unseat.
KCP has to wonder aloud and in this post where these esteemed local Democrats stand in regard to the left-leaning Women’s March Co-Chairs Tamika D.Mallory and [Bay Ridge resident] Linda Sarsour, both of whom refuse to distance themselves from one of America’s leading anti-Semites, the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan.
A number of people, this writer/publisher included, consider both Mallory and Sarsour at best on the edge of being anti-Semitic. Yet, this publisher supported Sarsour’s right to speak at a CUNY commencement last year, has extended an open invitation for her to contribute unedited op-eds to KCP, and defends her right to speak out in support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) of Israel, which this writer also finds on the edge of being anti-Semitic.
And just before this very editorial was being crafted, KCP posted our senior editor Kelly Mena’s Beat of the Week featuring an interview with Arab American Association of New York Executive Director Rama Ibrahim. Sarsour was a founding member of the organization and Ibrahim speaks about Arab-American political empowerment. Check it out.
Since its inception KCP has been all about ideas over ideology, bipartisanship and above everything else, freedom of speech. In this vein it says shame on the Democrats who worked so hard to stifle this most American of American radical ideals.
Both the French writer Voltaire and the American patriot Patrick Henry have been credited with the phrase, ““I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
I’m sure both men are now turning in their graves. This is not what America is and this is not what America will become – at least on KCP’s watch.
