Northwest Bronx Democrats: Freedom of opinion equals bullying?
By: Founder Anthony Rivieccio
Evelyn Torres might have said it best in a recent Facebook post: “Don’t lose friendships over two men that do not even know your names. It is ok to have different political views and still be ok with each other”.
Evelyn Torres is a Democrat. She and many other Democrats , including our club, Northwest Bronx Democrats, supported Gene Defrancis, a Republican, for the 80th Assembly race.
Not because we changed parties. Not because all of us all of a sudden hated the current Assemblywoman, Nathalia Fernandez. But because we felt that we were conserned about “quality of life” issues in our neighborhood and her concentrating on running her current” Borough President” race, instead of concentrating on going back to Albany and assist us with community resources.
And then, Democrats, who support ideas like freedom of speech and opinion — attacked and bullied!
Firstly, Democratic operatives called various local newspaper agencies to ask that our “byline column” no longer be published —that did not work.
Then representatives of the Assemblywoman had a meeting with the President of our organization, asking for a ” club coo” to take place and get rid of it’s founder- that didn’t work as well.
On election night, the Assemblywoman district leader, continued to harass and bully the campaign workers of Gene Defrancis, starting at 6am in the morning yelling at people, at a poll site ” let’s get rid of the Republicans” to later that afternoon, claiming on Facebook, that one (falsely) had “Covid”.
The latter hurt the most as the Board Of Elections seem to have taken that statement to stop Gene Defrancis pollworkets to go to pollsites to monitor the electorial process. Two coordinators at two different pollsites save stated that night that ” we can not let you in because the BOE has indicated that you have COVID and we can not afford a healthrisk”.
As of this writing conversations have taken place to BOE commissions and the Chairpeople of The Democratic and Republican parties for further investigation on this matter
Joe Biden said in his victory speech, “Now is the time to unify our countries. We should not be enemies with each other, we are Americans”.
It does not seem that a few Bronx Democrats, in the 80th Assembly district agree