California Tea Party groups are calling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s boycott and raising him a … boycott.
The mayor raised the ire of California Tea Partiers this week when, in response to Arizona’s passage of a controversial immigration law, he announced a boycott of the state, barring San Francisco city employees from entering Arizona and threatening to cut off economic ties. Local Tea Partiers who support the Arizona legislation answered his actions with a boycott of their own — on the city of San Francisco.
“We are just tired of our representatives not representing our wishes,” said Bridget Melson, president of the group Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party, which called for the boycott on Wednesday. “I think if you interviewed the majority of Californians it would be staggering to find how few of them support this Arizona boycott. Mayor Newsom is just way out of touch with the American people and the San Francisco people.”
The group has encouraged its members not to patronize local businesses. (Unlike Newsom, it has not asked them to avoid entering the city, which could prove problematic, given that a number of its members live there.) “Spend your money anywhere else…vacation elsewhere, dine elsewhere — if you protest here, bring your own food, coffee and water,” Melson writes in the boycott’s official call to arms. “I am very worried about this country. This is no joke here…This is how civil wars start.”
That’s right. “Civil war.”
The Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party will also be protesting Newsom’s actions, starting with a rally on May 1…in San Francisco.
Melson, despite advertising the event in her release, told TPM that she may or may not attend, depending on the availability of her bodyguard. “This one may get kind of out of hand,” she said.
When asked if she saw the irony in kicking off her group’s boycott of San Francisco with a protest in that city, Melson explained that the Pleasanton/NorCal TEA Party applies the term in reference to economics only. “The boycott is about not spending any money or furthering economic growth in San Francisco,” she said. “They’re trying to hurt Arizona — so we’re trying to hurt them back.”
