Mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, City Council candidate Timothy Rosen, and President Trump’s former housing official (as HUD Secretary) Dr. Ben Carson, all spoke at the Central Queens Republican meeting at Congregation Havurat Yisrael in Forest Hills on Thursday, August 26.

“Eric Adams says his hero and mentor is David Dinkins… I learned at the side of Rudy Giuliani, who saved this city,” said Sliwa of his Democratic mayoral opponent. “That’s the path I’m taking.”

“The professional political class” defunded the police by a billion dollars. “How has that worked out?” Sliwa would refund the money and hire 3,000 more officers. “We’ve got to take the handcuffs off the cops and put it on the criminals.”

Sliwa said he was locked up 76 times in 13 years because the City originally thought that “the Guardian Angels were the Hell’s Angels.” The City had the wrong idea. What he, Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian “selfless servants” were trying to do was “to help save our city.”

Started in 1979 in New York City, the Guardian Angels now number more than 5,000. They patrol subways and streets to ward off crime. Guardian Angels are in more than 130 cities in 13 countries, according to their website.

Sliwa said both Mayor de Blasio and candidate Eric Adams refused President Biden’s offer of $350 billion, out of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, towards policing. Sliwa would accept the money. “Public safety is the main issue.”

Sliwa said he would also start charging property taxes to Madison Square Garden, Columbia University, and New York University.

Sliwa has three sons currently in NYC public schools. “I want them doing the pledge of allegiance, singing the national anthem, and learning American history. I don’t want them being taught Critical Race Theory that divides Americans. This is a battle for the soul of our city.”

Sliwa decried the $1.5 billion spent by the Mayor’s wife for the THRIVE NYC mental health services, calling it ineffective. “Look how we treat the homeless and EDP (Emotional Disturbed Persons).” Sliwa “has been there in their time of need.”

Sliwa has 16 cats in his home. He will stop the City from spending millions of dollars killing animals. After being taken by the City’s animal care, if they are not adopted or taken by rescue organizations after 72 hours, they are put down.

Republican Timothy Rosen is running against Democrat James Gennaro for City Council in central Queens. Rosen is a graduate of Forest Hills, Queens College, and St. John’s Law School. After practicing law, Rosen is now a professor of business and liberal arts at Queens College.

Rosen is running “because the City is going down the drain.” De Blasio cut the number of police from around 40,000 to around 34,000. Rosen supports hiring 5,000 new cops and re-establishing the anti-crime unit. “If we don’t have crime under control, nothing else is really going to matter,” said Rosen.

Small business should not have so much red tape, regulations, and licensing fees, said Rosen. “If we help small business, we help our economy, we get the tourists back.”

Lastly, Rosen said that there only three Republicans out of the 51 City Council members. Many elected officials are Leftists who “hate the police; they hate capitalism, just dyed-in-the-wool Marxists.”

Dr. Ben Carson is a neurosurgeon who ran in the Republican Presidential primaries in 2016. He served as the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump administration. He spoke live and took questions through Zoom at the meeting.

Carson spoke of core American values. Faith is one of them. The “Judeo-Christian foundation that teaches you to love your neighbor, not to hate your neighbor, not to ‘cancel’ your neighbor, if they disagree with you.”

“Liberty is such a vital part of who we are, why so many people wanted to move here in the first place.” Liberty is threatened when big tech, like Facebook, Twitter, etc., “imposes restrictions on your speech, and government is compliant with it.”

Community is an important American value where “people with different talents were able to work together… Our relationships with that have become much more coarse.”

“We have the responsibility of raising children the right way.” Quoting Proverbs 22, Carson said, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not turn from it.”

Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project teaches White people, “You’re an oppressor” who “created all these problems for everyone else… If you’re a minority, you’re a hopeless victim and you should feel resentful.” This is damaging for children while they are developing their own self-image, said Carson.

The 1619 Project says America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619, with the introduction of slavery. First published in the NY Times Magazine in 2019, it “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative,” according to criticalrace.org/the-1619-project.

Critical Race Theory wants to “emphasize the effects of race on one’s social standing,” according to thoughtco.com/critical-race-theory-4685094.

Leftist policies in big cities encourage dependency, homelessness, and crime, said Carson, who is with the American Cornerstone Institute, a Conservative think-tank, working on these issues.

The Central Queens Republican Club started in the spring of 2020, with now about 60 members, said board member Kathryn Donnelly.

The club will feature speakers petitioning for candidates and giving people information. “We’re going door-to-door in places that in the past, Republicans haven’t been to: Jackson Heights, Briarwood, and Middle Village.”

In Jamaica, “we see a lot of conservative people there who didn’t even know there was a conservative club.” There are people “who think like us but just never even thought there were other people who thought like them. That’s part of the goal of our club.”

For more information or to get involved with the Central Queens Republican Club, go to www.central.queens.gop.

By David Schneier