Who said the following?
“[Illegal Hispanics] are killing, like, 25 of us a day … molesting about eight children a day … All we’re getting is drug dealers and murderers.”
“These illegal invaders … are not the kind of immigrants our grandparents were … They knew to be successful in America, you have to speak English.”
“You come here, pop a baby, pick it up and take it back to Mexico.”
“These people are coming here—they don’t want to assimilate; they want us to learn their language and their culture … stay there.”
“Every other group that came in here, they knew their trick to success was speaking our language.”
The answer is: Joey Vento, the owner of Geno’s Cheesesteaks in South Philadelphia. Vento first achieved fame outside the city of brotherly love by posting a sign saying, “THIS IS AMERICA: WHEN ORDERING ‘SPEAK ENGLISH”. Geno’s Cheesesteaks sits on the corner of Passyunk and 9th, kitty-corner from Pat’s King of Steaks. Every visiting politician makes a stop at Pat’s and Geno’s. John Kerry did real damage to his campaign when he visited Pat’s and attempted to get swiss cheese on his steak. You can get American, provolone, or cheeze whiz, but you cannot get swiss. If you try to get swiss, people think you are some kind of elitist, wind-surfing, Frenchman. Yous can complain about it, but this is Philly and people don’t trust anyone that wants swiss cheese on their cheesesteak.
Of course, Joey Vento only recently revealed himself to be a raving racist. The Philly Weekly describes the situation:
On Oct. 1 GOP front-running presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, came to our city.
On the way to a fundraising event, he stopped by Geno’s Steaks at Ninth and Passyunk, and embraced Joey Vento, the biggest symbol of ignorance, intolerance and immigrant-bashing in the U.S. today.
Vento’s thinly disguised abhorrence of brown people—don’t just take our word for it; his vile screeds are available with the simplest of searches on YouTube for all to see—has been an ongoing embarrassment to the city and to the brotherly love we allegedly stand for.
How did Guiliani embrace this man?
“Imagine the outrage if some Southern conservative—Trent Lott, say—had made a pilgrimage to an unapologetically rebel-flagged sort like Vento,” wrote former Inquirer reporter Michael Currie Schaffer in an eloquent and persuasive piece for The New Republic online last week. “But Giuliani, whose New York background serves as a surprisingly effective shield against the charges of intolerance that once punctuated his mayoral administration, managed to make the trip looking less like an actual bigot than a shameless panderer. And once he got there, he lived up to it. ‘Whenever I’m at Geno’s, I order in English,’ Giuliani told a local TV reporter. If he’s lucky, GOP voters in South Carolina caught glimpses of Vento’s [Confederate flag] tattoos as the pair mugged for cameras.”
Vento, says Schaffer, once told a reporter that Mexicans carry disease into the U.S. because they “play and drink out of the same water.”
Following Giuliani’s appearance at Geno’s, Vento went on the Fox News Channel and endorsed the former New York mayor for president.
The Giuliani campaign quickly posted the cheesesteak stand owner’s endorsement of their candidate on their official YouTube campaign site.
Got that?
And perhaps the saddest thing of all is the response of Reneé Amoore, the Deputy Chair of the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee…and an African-American woman:
“I think it’s a good thing because the politicians need to—whether they’re on the R side or the D side—they need to be out in the community, and too many times they just deal with fundraisers. Giuliani will go anywhere at any time, and he’s always up for controversy. That’s just who he is and what he’s about, and he’ll deal with anything and everything, and I think people have seen that since 9/11—even before 9/11—so it wasn’t an issue for him. Sometimes he takes on stuff so people know he has no problem dealing with any issue. And I think that’s what makes him so popular. I wasn’t happy that my leading Republican candidates didn’t attend Tavis Smiley’s forum, for example, but then Giuliani put something out to say why he didn’t attend, so he’ll take it on where other folks didn’t respond at all. I think he was there, and he wanted people to know how he felt, and he’s just straight up like that. He doesn’t hide stuff real well at all. Even with his family stuff, he made it real clear where he was with that. He puts it out there, and he moves ahead and he moves on. And it’s either you like him or you don’t. I just happen to like him.”
