We can’t allow people to lawfully contribute to political causes they believe in. Oh no!
SANTA CRUZ >> A long-time Westside Chinese food restaurant has shuttered, perhaps permanently, in the face of a boycott and heated online backlash against the owner’s 2016 political donations.
Roger Grigsby, owner of O’mei Szechuan Chinese Restaurant, said on Wednesday that he made several donations adding up to $500 to the U.S. Senate campaign of Louisiana’s David Duke during his unsuccessful 2016 run. Duke served as a Ku Klux Klan leader from 1974 to 1978. Grigsby said he has been dealing with “political terror” and an “attack” on his business as word of his donations has spread from an alternative news site to a business review site to neighborhood discussion boards and blogs.
“They spread the gossip, they spread it as if it’s truth. All the things they called me: white supremacist, neo-Nazi, KKK — it’s all bullshit,” Grigsby said by phone. “My girlfriend and my former wife were both Chinese. Anybody who knows me, it’s like the United Colors of Benetton in our restaurant. We’ve had every ethnicity.”
Grigsby’s donations, publicly available information through the Federal Election Commission, were brought to light on Aug. 16 by community news site The San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, at Indybay.org. The issue of Grigsby’s donations comes in the wake of the Aug. 12 violent clashes between a white nationalist rally and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one dead.
Grigsby, who also made several donations adding up to $500 to the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee,” according to public campaign disclosure listings on the U.S. Federal Election Commission website fec.gov, defended his support of Duke’s campaign. Duke, he said, is unfairly characterized by the news media as a “hate caricature.”
“He is defending the civil rights of European-Americans, whites, defending them from attacks against them,” Grigsby said of Duke. “If you can’t see that in the media, I don’t know what to tell you. The very word, ‘white supremacist’ is an attack. Nobody calls Mexicans and blacks and Chinese ‘Nazis.’ They only call white people ‘Nazis.’ The idea there is to make guilt by association of two words. White people and evil Nazis.”
