Photo Courtesy of Councilman Van Bramer’s Office
Van Bramer addresses the crowd on Saturday on 5th Avenue.
By Michael V. Cusenza
“Donald Trump may have been raised in Queens, but he’s not from here anymore!”
City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Sunnyside) on Saturday sent his rallying cry through a megaphone and basked in the roar of approval.
The Council majority leader and more than a thousand President-elect-loathing pals armed with signs marched from Long Island City over the Queensboro Bridge to Trump Tower in Manhattan for the “Queens Responds with Queens Values” demonstration “to say loud and clear that while the President-elect may have been born in this borough, he does not share our #QueensValues.”
Van Bramer would later outline those World’s Borough principles.
“This is what we believe in Queens: We reject racism. Structural, systemic racism is real and we must fight it at every turn. We reject misogyny and a culture that tolerates and even celebrates or jokes about sexual assault. We reject the advancement of political careers on the backs of immigrants. We reject this insipid hatred of the undocumented. They are our neighbors too. Their children are our children also. We pledge to fight to keep them safe. We support our LGBTQ families – the right to marry the person you love, the rights of LGBT couples to have children – and keep them – and we support the rights of our gender non-conforming neighbors. And we reject the scapegoating and violence directed at our Muslim brothers and sisters.
“Someone once said that together, all of us are stronger. We still believe that. And we also still believe love trumps hate.”
The Sunnyside pol spearheaded the event just days after receiving death threats in his email inbox:
“Rest of the people from Queens do not agree with your homosexual lifestyle. I will keep a close eye on your every moves [sic] so that when it’s time to execute traitors, I will try my best so that you [sic] name is included in that list of traitors. Execution is the penalty for a traitor, that is the Law Of This Land!”
Van Bramer thanked the NYPD for their attention to the threats and their role in helping the march go so smoothly.
“The more we speak out, some people may get angrier, but I think that is just because we keep reminding them of the hatred and challenging them …,” Van Bramer told Politico NY. “This is not a normal thing to happen in our democracy, where people get elected based on hatred of others and then people who peacefully protest are then the objects of hate and death threats.”
Van Bramer also commended the community for coming together “in an incredible show of unity and determination.”
“With one voice, we loudly proclaimed that misogyny, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and hatred of all kinds are not our #QueensValues,” said the chairman of the Council Committee on Cultural Affairs and Libraries. “The President-elect may have been raised in our borough but he’s not from here anymore – and when the people who live here now come together, our power is unstoppable.”
