The Tea Party movement has officially landed in Brooklyn — and not just in the form of another ironic Sarah Palin lookalike contest.
Despite the borough’s reputation as a hipster-friendly liberal bastion, around 35 Tea Partiers gathered on Saturday in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn to protest the Cordoba Initiative’s plan to build a Muslim community center two blocks north from New York’s Ground Zero.
Dr. John Press started the Brooklyn branch last March, due to what he perceived as an opening in the market. “I was like, if no one else is doing it, I will,” he said in an interview with TPM. “Everyone considers Brooklyn Democratic territory, and I think there’s a lot of apathy. But there are some areas in Brooklyn where Republicans and people with Tea Party sympathy can have some hope of winning a seat.” (Press, incidentally, lives in Manhattan.)
While turnout was relatively thin Saturday, the group’s Facebook page has more than 700 members, and many of those at the rally this weekend planned to continue their participation with the group — regardless of its next cause. “I’m not into studying politics or anything like that,” said 21-year-old Brooklyn native Eugene Pevzner, who helped organize the event. “I’m kind of just involved in the community. The Tea Party is running on the premise that, you know, we’re tired of the left, we’re tired of the right — we want to actually see things get done.”
And while this weekend’s rally lacked a strong presence in the way of sideswept bangs and thick-rimmed spectacles, it was not entirely without a touch of ironic Brooklyn charm. When asked which neighborhood he’d come out from, one attendee — a gruff union construction worker in a Harley Davidson t-shirt who identified himself as Burnt Out Bill — named Greenpoint and said, “We could be yuppies. I’m a Young Urban Plumber.”
The Muslim community center being protested Saturday would, if approved, result in a 15-story building at 45 Park Place, which would house a prayer center, a 500-seat performing arts center, a pool, a restaurant, and a culinary school, all for the purpose of “serving as a platform for inter-community gatherings and cooperation at all levels,” and “promoting integration, tolerance of difference and community cohesion through arts and culture.” It would also create more than 150 full-time and 500 part-time jobs.
The proposal has drawn the ire of many on the right — and the newly-minted members of the Brooklyn Tea Party didn’t hesitate to tow the party line. Andrew Sullivan, a first-responder at 9/11 and speaker at Saturday’s rally (not The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan), argued that the center is “in direct contrast of what our Constitution stands for.”
“It’s not just slamming planes into buildings or strapping bombs to themselves,” Sullivan said. “They’re coming here, they’re breeding. They come with soft-spoken voices. They hide behind the liberals, they hide behind the media.”
