While speaking in front of a dilapidated building once owned by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan was told by Booker supporters go “go back where you came from,” PolitickerNJ reported Tuesday.
Booker, a Democrat running for the Senate seat, gave the property away for $1 to a charity he reportedly founded after paying $179,000 for it in 2009.
According to neighbors, the building was frequented by squatters who were responsible for a fire there last year.
Lonegan said the building, which he described as a crack house, was an example of poor stewardship on Booker’s part.
“A tax deduction,” he said. “While he dumps this horrific piece of garbage on the city.”
But that didn’t sit well with Booker supporters present at the conference.
“Go back where you came from,” one person cried out, and others followed suit, shouting over Lonegan as he tried to speak.
“Cory! Cory! Cory! Cory!” the supporters screamed.
“I expected it,” Lonegan said.
According to PolitickerNJ, Lonegan used a Booker quote to make his point: “Abandoned and neglected properties, if left unaddressed, can create public safety and health concerns for our residents. Externally, their presence falsely exhibits a lack of care and pride in Newark’s communities creating eyesores in our neighborhoods and imposing unfair burdens on neighborhood residents.”
“Is Cory Booker allowed to be where Lonegan is from?” asked a post at the Gateway Pundit.
After protesters finished disrupting Lonegan’s conference, they moved on to their headquarters, described by NorthJersey.com as “the offices of a charity Booker himself helped start.”
“All that yelling and hopping on the street that all the activists do, at the end of the day it’s about: How can you service the community?” said Abdul Muhammad, one of the activists who heckled Lonegan who is also co-director of the non-profit Fathers Now, an offshoot of the charity Booker started.
Muhammad claimed no one sent him and his supporters to Lonegan’s event.
“We got no phone calls from nobody whatsoever to go there, to counter this. I don’t operate like that, personally,” he said.
The Booker campaign also denied involvement in the activity.
“The campaign was not involved with the protesters who showed up to object to Mr. Lonegan’s attacks on Mayor Booker and the city of Newark,” said Booker spokesman Kevin Griffis. “As for Lonegan’s criticisms, as one of his supporters once said, he ‘thinks if he continues to say something long enough it’s true.’ This is just more hyperbole and nonsense from a desperate, extreme campaign.”
A post at Weasel Zippers noted the double standard and wondered: “Can you imagine the outcry if whites were telling blacks to ‘go back where you came from’?”
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- Democratic activist attacks GOP congressman’s wife with campaign sign
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