The Queens Village
Republican Club stands with people of all faiths, but now at a time of rampant
anti-Semitic attacks, we stand up in outrage and stand up for justice with the
2 million people of Jewish faith in New York State. Violent anti-Semitic
attacks were committed by perpetrators who were released without bail even
before the new bail reform law kicks in on January 1, 2020. Last night, at a
celebration of the seventh night of Chanukah, we witnessed a bloody
anti-Semitic attack at the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg
in Monsey, NY where 5 people were severely wounded. Recently we witnessed
at least 13 vicious anti-Semitic attacks in New York State and many more on
college campuses across the country.
The recent wave of criminal justice activism has gone way too far! Our club is
outraged as we are witnessing the breakdown of law and order due to the
feckless policies of the Democrats running a one-party government in our city
and state. The outcome of Democrat Party rule is that New York City and New
York State are going in the wrong direction. We see the consequences of
bail reform, and radical leftist policies calling for closing Rikers,
freeing 1000’s of inmates, defying ICE, and even abolishing our
police force, where criminals are emboldened to commit atrocious
anti-Semitic acts with impunity and are released without bail.
The left is mobilized and organized, and they have taken every
Democrat elected official hostage. We believe the only way to fight back is to
organize, recruit and register Republicans! We need a strong organization of
Republican county committee activists who can get out the vote to elect
Republicans who can make policy changes in our government that effect our
everyday life. We must turn the tide!
This is the time to act, and we will do so. We ask all our club members and
friends to stand with us and the Jewish people of New York!
THURS. JAN. 2, 2020 at 7:30 PM At: Young Israel of Holliswood – Holliswood Jewish Center 86-25 Francis Lewis Blvd., Holliswood, NY 11427 CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
A speech by Ann Coulter at University of California, Berkeley drew more than a thousand protesters. Photo Credit: The Daily Californian/Daniela Cervantes/Senior Staff
Our college campuses are out of
control. They’ve become hotbeds of anti-American indoctrination. It’s time for
Republicans to get involved in our school systems from top to bottom.
Years ago, our colleges and
universities were noble institutions dedicated to truth-seeking and transmitting
our cherished heritage from the classical Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian roots of our Western Civilization.
Today these same institutions are offering courses with such titles as
“Dismantling White Privilege, Power, and Supremacy,” “Marx for Today”
and “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology,” with no tolerance for
differing political views. Many have
become intolerant ideological centers of “Cultural Marxism,” penalizing any
speech deemed offensive or deviating from the politically correct dogma.
The “cancel culture” is now dominant on
college campuses. In November, a 200-strong leftist student mob at Binghamton
University violently attacked a small group of College Republican students
handing out literature promoting an upcoming lecture by well-known economist
Art Laffer. They destroyed the tables and physically threatened the Republican
students for expressing their political views and support for Israel. The
rioting student radicals later prevented Laffer from speaking, cancelling the
lecture before he could utter a word. They believe they have a right to use
physical violence to stamp out what they consider offensive opinions. A Yale
study reveals that 31% of college students believe it’s OK to use violence to
stop “hate speech” or “racially charged language.”
Violent protests have stopped Ben
Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jordan Peterson and many other conservative campus
speakers. Ann Coulter was invited to speak at Berkeley, ironically known as the
“birthplace of the free speech movement.” But her speech was suddenly cancelled
when leftist student mobs decided to riot. Yet, the bloody Iranian dictator
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was welcomed with open arms at Columbia University, and a
dean at Columbia said he would gladly welcome Adolf Hitler to speak on campus.
Recently Bucknell University invited and applauded an Antifa leader who
promotes political violence against conservatives to speak on campus, while a
professor called President Trump a “White Supremacist” and his election an “act
of terrorism.”
This is nothing new. It’s
the outcome of the long march of the left into our cultural and academic
institutions. In the 1960s, when student radicals and leftists failed in their
attempted revolution in the streets to overthrow America, they marched into our
schools and colleges to become teachers, professors and administrators. It was
part of a carefully planned non-violent agenda to topple our nation by a
cultural revolution to control the minds and radicalize our children.
Nelson Mandela said it best: “Education is the most powerful
weapon which you can use to change the world.” Former FBI agent, Cleon
Skousen testified before Congress in 1963 on the goals of Communists infiltrating
our nation: “Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for
socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control
of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.”
Unrepentant anti-American and former terrorist Bill Ayers
A leading
figure in the revolution from the streets to the schools, was Bill Ayers,
leader of the Weather Underground, a 1960s domestic terrorist group. He
participated in bombing government buildings throughout the country, including
the Pentagon and the Capitol. “Kill all the rich people. … Bring the
revolution home. Kill your parents” were his words of wisdom.
This unrepentant domestic
terrorist, who never taught in a classroom, became a distinguished professor of
education at the University of Illinois. Today teachers throughout America
indoctrinate our children using his radical program of education for social
justice, teaching that America is racist, oppressive and evil and that
socialism is the solution.
This is a call to action. Republicans
and Conservatives, and all honest citizens who love America need to get
involved in our education system. We can follow the lead of our great President
Trump, who recently signed an historic executive order to battle anti-Semitism
on college campuses. This executive order protects Jewish students from bigotry
and discrimination by making Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act apply to
anti-Semitic acts, withholding federal tax dollars from academic institutions
that won’t combat this growing hatred. Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said
there has been “no more important event … to turn universities away from
being bastions of hatred and discrimination than this executive
order.…it will go down in history as one of the most important events in
the 2,000-year battle against anti-Semitism.”
President Trump displays Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism after signing it on Dec. 11. At right is Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.
There is a great deal that Republicans
can do to follow in the footsteps of our president to cut federal and state
funding for schools that refuse to protect the freedom of speech rights of
students and faculty, or refuse to take action against violent offenders on
campus. Our education system is rotten to the core and reforming it should be
the number one priority for all Republican candidates running for elected
office. We Republican voters need to
mobilize our ranks, build our county committees in every AD, and get out the
vote in 2020 for our President Trump and any Republican who champions this
issue!
Our January 2nd Club meeting
will feature several New York City college professors who are spearheading the
battle against the abuses of the left on their respective campuses. Come, bring
your friends, especially students and faculty, to hear their proud stories of
how they are fighting back! We all need to get involved in order to save our
country and defend our civilization for future generations. Our long march back
into our colleges and universities has begun. Nothing can stop us now!
Join Professor Langbert, featured speaker at QVGOP’s New Years Club Meeting on Academic Freedom!
THURS. JAN. 2, 2020 at 7:30 PM At: Young Israel of Holliswood – Holliswood Jewish Center 86-25 Francis Lewis Blvd., Holliswood, NY 11427 CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
I grew up in Long Island City, Queens,
just south of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district. I began my political life as a left-wing
Democrat. In 1972, when I was 18, the
Vietnam War was raging, and anti-war protests were the rage. However, I soon noticed that the left was
more image than substance, more a matter of signaling than of achieving virtue. After I graduated from college in 1975, I
read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, took a corporate job, and watched
Abraham Beame and the Democrats oversee the city’s bankruptcy, which was due
to Beame’s accounting; public sector
unions; Robert Moses’s urban redevelopment policies; and a decades-long
commitment to taxes, regulation and welfare.
Because of the exodus of corporate
headquarters from New York, in 1986 I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in my field, human
resources. The instruction I received at
Columbia Business School was first-rate, but when I entered the professional
academic world at a university in New York’s North Country, I realized that the
march to the left had progressed past the point of no return. Left-wing feminist professors, often based in
“studies” programs (gender studies, ethnic studies), routinely harassed untenured,
conservative professors. A glance across a hallway was a reason for a formal
sexual harassment complaint. Professors who questioned preferential policies
were subject to “investigation” by the college’s human resource
department. Professors who questioned
the official, left-wing narrative were subject to whispering-and-defamation
campaigns.
Because of political harassment, I left
the North Country after two-and-a-half years, and after two brief stints at New
York-area colleges I began a career at Brooklyn College in 1998. During the ensuing 21 years I suffered a
number of left-wing attacks, including a demand that I resign from a departmental
personnel committee because I insisted that job candidates have credentials
relevant to the department’s field (business administration) rather than just have
racial or gender credentials; a formal investigation because I said that
slavery did not contribute to long-term American economic ascendancy (the more
horrific and profitable slavery in the West Indies not having led to economic
success there, for instance); and a national media campaign to fire me, led by
a pro-Antifa professor, because I made light of the accusations against Justice
Brett Kavanaugh.
As I have noted in a recent piece in The
College Fix, the attacks against me failed, and since then my work has been
covered by Lou Dobbs, the New York Post editorial page and elsewhere. Notice, though, that I have tenure, have
favorable student evaluations, and have published 30 academic articles. A more
recent hire would not have been likely to survive. When the New York Sun closed, the
city lost the only newspaper that had paid attention to left-wing academic
abuses.
Meanwhile, I developed an interest in
academic reform. Together with Phil
Orenstein, I campaigned for an academic bill of rights in the early 2000s, and
I began to pursue research on education.
My recent research concerns faculty political
affiliations. The origins of left-only
universities can be traced to two early twentieth century foundations: the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Rockefeller’s General
Education Board. These foundations
provided financial incentives to secularize universities, and the New Deal,
which used universities as left-oriented ideological-mediating institutions,
cemented the incentives. Subsequently,
Democrats and RINOs have provided ongoing moral and financial support to
academic groupthink. At present,
virtually no Republican donors work as professors in the four leading
universities in 30 states that I have recently sampled.
Things are far gone in both higher and K-12 education, but the Department of Education, even under our beloved president, has not done enough to systematically study how far. I am asking Republicans to pressure Betsy DeVos and elected officials to begin to study what can be done. So far, the DOE under Secretary DeVos has implemented Title IX reform, but little more.
Mitchell Langbert is an Associate Professor of Business at Brooklyn College. His research recently has focused on political affiliations of professors and executives. His Blog features insights into politics, current events, the economy and higher education.
Elizabeth Pipko Centinello, who told me in our interview in Manhattan last week., couldn’t ever had dreamed of becoming a model as she was awkward and shy most of her life. Photo used with permission from Elizabeth’s Instagram account: @elizabethpipko
Life had been filled
with fame and fortune for the writer and model Elizabeth Pipko. In 2013, at the
age of just 17, she wrote and self- published, her first book, “Sweet Sixteen”,
a collection of deeply personal poems. A
year later, she composed a second book, also exclusively of poetry, titled, “About
You”, which was described in Arian Huffington’s “Thrive Global” newsletter as
among the “best books to read before you sleep.”
The same year she
published “Sweet Sixteen”, Pipko signed a contract to model for Wilhemia
Models, a top agency in the profession. Within months, photos of Pipko began
appearing in major fashion magazines, including DT, Maxim and Esquire. The
following five years proved even kinder to Pipko’s modeling career; her growing
legions of fans could find pictures of her on the pages of People and Vanity Fair and on
the covers of Supermodels SA and L’ Officiel.
“I couldn’t ever have even dreamed of becoming
a model because I was an awkward and shy person most of my life”, stated Pipko,
as we began our interview in Manhattan last week. “So becoming a model became
even more than a dream come true for me”.
In early summer of 2016, however, Pipko, made what
was to be a life changing decision, putting that dream come true at risk. It was a decision which she believed she had to
keep hidden from the heads of the modeling and fashion industries, afraid that
if her secret was uncovered, she would never be allowed to work as a model
again.
That secret was
simply that Pipko had decided to work on the campaign for then presidential
candidate Donald Trump. Pipko, who told me that she had little interest in
politics before then, explained what motivated her to work for Trump, although fearful
that it could end her modeling career.
“I had always considered
myself to be a non-political person”, she stated. “I was immersed in the world
around me, finding similarities between myself and those on both sides of the
political aisle, and therefore choosing to pay very little attention to current
day politics.
“And then”, she
further explained, “I saw Donald Trump on television. He was discussing his
promise to bring jobs back for Americans and his plans to always keep America
first. And when I heard him also promise
that he would tear up the Iran Nuclear deal and work to regain our once
incredibly strong relationship with our greatest and most loyal friend, the State
of Israel, I was incredibly impressed, and he won my total support.”
Pipko was in fact so
impressed that a few days later she walked into the candidate’s campaign headquarters
in Trump Towers and signed up to work as a volunteer in the building’s call
center. “The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ kept ringing in my ears, because
I believed that if Donald Trump won, he would deliver on that promise”, she recalled.
“So every hour and every day that I worked on the campaign to get this great
man elected president was an honor for me as a loyal American, who never
imagined herself, at just 21 years old, to be in such a position.”
After serving as a volunteer for 2 months, the
Trump campaign offered Pipko a salaried position as the coordinator of campaign
volunteers throughout America.
“I jumped at the
offer and accepted the job”, stated Pipko. “But having over the past year heard
virtually every executive, agent and model and even friend in the industry
repeating the same canard about how evil Donald Trump is, I knew that if I
wanted to keep modeling, I had to keep my new job a secret”.
By chance, however, Pipko encountered one of the few models in NYC who shared both her political views and fears. “In the summer of 2016, I was working at campaign headquarters at Trump Towers when I ran into a top male model whom I had known from Wilhelmina”, Pipko remembered. “When we spoke, I found that, he like me, was working for Trump because he believed that Trump would fulfill his promise to make America great again. Also, like me, he knew that if the folks in the modeling industry ever found out what he was doing, his career would be over. Our conversation reinforced my decision to keep my work for the Trump campaign a secret.”
Pipko continued to
keep that work a secret for two more years- until love intervened. On December 26th, 2018, she married
Darren Centinello, also a Trump campaign staffer, whom she had met and fallen in
love with during the campaign.
“My personal and
political life became intertwined when I fell in love with Darren”, she reflected. “So, after our wedding, I knew the time had
come to put my concerns about my modeling career out of my mind and announce publicly
that I had proudly worked for and continue to proudly support President Trump.”
That appearance on Fox and Friends did in fact put an end to her once flourishing modelling career. But Pipko had no regrets.
Within the first day of the column’s
publication, Pipko received the reaction she had both feared and expected for
the then past 2 years. “There were many people in the industry, some of whom I
had thought were close friends, who sent me emails saying the most terrible
thing about me”, she recalled. “And when I tried to contact some other friends
whom I had not heard from hoping for their support, my emails and phone calls
were never returned.”
Pipko intrepidly moved on to the TV media,
where the following day she appeared on the Fox station news talk show Fox and
Friends. There Pipko explained why she had made the decision to put her
modeling career in jeopardy by revealing that she had worked on the Trump
presidential campaign. “I explained to the hosts and the audience”, she stated,
“that I had come to the realization that my work on behalf of a great candidate
who ended up becoming President of the United States and {supporting}, all that
he was doing for our great country was far more important to me than a
modelling career.”
That appearance on Fox and Friends did in fact
put an end to her once flourishing modelling career. But Pipko had no regrets. “I was never offered another modeling
assignment after my appearance on Fox and Friends”, she told me. “Yet I was
fine with that. I was ready to begin a new phase of my life.”
Starting this past March that “new phase” of
her life evolved into a political crusade, now known as “The Exodus Movement”. Pipko,
who is an orthodox Jew, a self- described “proud Zionist”, an outspoken critic of
the powerful anti- Israel faction of the Democratic Party, and, as we already know, a loyal Trump
supporter, described the purpose of The Exodus Movement, which now has branches
in 12 states containing large Jewish populations, which include California,
Florida, New York and New Jersey.
“We are asking
American Jews and our allies to fight anti- Semitism, which has become
frighteningly unmistakable in the political left of the Democratic Party”, she
asserted. “Our goal is to fight that growing and vile anti-Semitism by supporting
political candidates who will proudly stand up for Jewish Americans and our
great ally, the State of Israel. {Thus} we are leading an exodus of Jews and
their friends from a party {The Democratic Party}, which continues to fail to
take our concerns to heart.”
Still, Pipko acknowledged that The Exodus Movement faces an uphill battle trying to convince Jews, who have in the past supported Democratic candidates by an almost 4- 1 margin, to vote to re-elect President Donald Trump. Nevertheless, she told me that she remains undaunted. Stating that The Exodus Movement and similar organizations have exposed what she repeated to contend is the anti- Israel bias and the anti- Semitic rhetoric of the powerful leftist extremist members of the Democratic Party, she asserted, “It remains our goal to be able to convince Jewish Democrats to reconsider their political allegiance and vote for President Trump in 2020.”
Pipko is presenting that same message to the audiences of her old friends at Fox and several other news channels, where she appears as a frequent guest. “I am asked my opinion on a variety of different issues on these shows” she noted. But then she added that the opinion that she most commonly shares with the hosts and viewing audience is that “President Trump has truly made good on his promise to make America great again.”
With those final words, it became even clearer
to me that Pipko continues to be free of care about what her former bosses,
colleagues and friends in the fashion and modeling industries think of her or
her political views.
Robert Golomb is a nationally and internationally published columnist. Mail him at MrBob347@aol.com or follow him on Twitter@RobertGolomb
