President Biden is attending a fundraiser, hosted by Michael Douglas, Eileen Fischer, and a few other wealthy, liberal elites who live in my town. The disruption to residents’ lives and local small businesses is intrusive and appalling.
Irvington, New York is a sleepy little river town famous for being home to Washington Irving and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It is less than two miles long, with one Main Street of businesses and New York State Route 9 running through it, separating the homes on the Hudson River from those located in the hills overlooking the river.
When my husband and I moved here 35 years ago, it was quite a different town. We chose it for its quiet vibes, scenic views and parks, good schools, proximity to New York City, and friendly and low-key residents, many of whom were “townies” who were raised here and become police officers, volunteer firefighters, coaches for the high school sports teams, and business-owners.
The scenic views and proximity to the city remain. Otherwise, the once slightly conservative town is now a liberal bastion of hell for those of us who don’t support sanctuary cities, defunding the police, and the antisemitic Black Lives Matter movement.
When we moved here, Irvington had a Republican mayor. The mayor who oversaw most of the changes was born and raised here. He served six terms — the first two as a Republican, next two as an independent, and the last two as a Democrat. He finally became honest about his ideology as he and the boards of trustees over the years followed the same path as many blue cities across the country.
Former mayor Brian Smith’s proudest accomplishment was turning Irvington into Westchester’s first sanctuary city. When I attended the meeting to fight this, I was a lone voice. By this point, liberal ideologues had moved from the Upper West Side and Park Slope, bringing their crazy and destructive ideas with them. I was shouted down, laughed at, and belittled.
The mayor lied in order to pull at the heartstrings of town residents, making up a story about his young son asking about a poor immigrant busboy in a local restaurant. Perhaps he learned the art of lying about family members in order to manipulate constituents from the king of such tactics: Joe Biden.
A year or two after Irvington became a sanctuary city, it also experienced its first murder in 40 years, when two kitchen staffers in a local restaurant got into a fight. Coincidence?
A few years later, the liberal powers-that-be decided that it was unfair for Irvington to have private parks that couldn’t be accessed by the public. Two of the largest and most scenic parks are on the Hudson River, next to the train station, which would provide easy access to everyone who wanted to spend an afternoon utilizing the facilities — playgrounds, basketball courts, barbeques, and picnic tables. That taxpayers were footing the bill for maintenance, clean-up, and most importantly security didn’t matter, as long as the liberals didn’t have something that others couldn’t also have.
The craziness in town culminated in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter protests, during which the town formed a committee to conduct a review of the Irvington Police Department. The committee of about 25 individuals consisted of the board of trustees and volunteer residents. I participated as the sole conservative voice on the committee, and several police officers listened in on meetings.
The town paid tens of thousands of dollars for two facilitators to run the meetings — a black man and a Hispanic woman. During the first Zoom meeting (this was during COVID), I was immediately labeled a racist when I questioned the black man stating that the next George Floyd could happen in our town. It was a ludicrous statement, indicating that he knew nothing about Irvington, but the progressives on the committee ate it up and literally spent the next several months labeling me a racist for defending the IPD.
After months of me sharing information on the lack of evidence of endemic racism in police departments (that went ignored), we held a community meeting with Irvington residents, who were asked to provide their input. A Hispanic woman accused the police of attacking her husband simply because he had brown skin. I FOIAed the video of the incident as well as the police report, both of which proved that the woman was lying and had made up the entire story. The police actually intervened as her husband aggressively approached a white woman in the lobby of the police station — they simply stood between him and the young woman. I sent the video to the committee members. Their response: it was her truth, and we had to respect it.
As the committee prepared its recommendations, many of the members wished to defund the police and replace them with social workers. Thankfully, that did not get enough support. But the experience led to officers — several of whom were born and raised their children here — retiring immediately upon their pension vesting rather than staying on. Some even moved away. And of course, the hiring of new officers would now be based, in part, on skin color.
I share all of this to provide background on the insanity that now pervades my formerly special, beautiful home, which progressives destroyed. Biden is here, and I’m stuck at home, not able to drive my car off my street, walk my dogs on the path that I usually do, or go into town to dine in one of the restaurants we frequent. My husband can’t get home from work.
Route 9 has been closed from one town north through Irvington and down many miles through four additional towns. Interstate 287 was also completely closed from Westchester Country airport through the Tappan Zee Bridge. The disruption to residents across the county is extensive.
Schools in all of these towns were forced to close early, and after school activities were canceled. Biden just pulled into town, but the Secret Service and state, county, and town police shut our town down at around hours earlier.
I don’t want to even think about how much this is costing Irvington (every officer was forced to work) and Westchester residents in order to protect the man who has consciously chosen to ignore his duty to protect us as Americans. The selfishness on the part of Michael Douglas and the other hosts isn’t surprising — the world revolves around liberals as they live in their blue bubble of entitlement and progressivism, all so that the worst president in the history of America could make some money while hobnobbing with rich and famous idiots.
Irvington’s Metro-North train station provided easy access to the pro-Hamas, terror-supporting Jew-haters who marched up Main Street and are protesting as close to the venue as possible. Their lives weren’t disrupted by this, but the rest of ours were. Biden didn’t care, since some of the attendees paid upwards of $100,000 for a few minutes in a living room with a senile, inarticulate, bumbling liar.
My town was thrown into chaos when Biden came to town. But the world was thrown into chaos the second he entered office, so I’m not surprised. And while I can try to sell my house (taxes are ridiculously high, the schools are liberal indoctrination centers, the residents are intolerant progressives), Irvington was my home that progressives destroyed. If they get another four years, there won’t be many places to which escape is possible.
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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
