A white man’s bigoted tantrum went viral Wednesday, after journalist Shaun King posted footage of the individual berating Spanish-speaking employees at a Manhattan café.
The incident went down earlier this week at Fresh Kitchen in midtown, where the man threatened to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the eatery’s staff after he heard them communicating with patrons in a language other than English.
“Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English,” the man said in the video. “Every person I listen to—he's speaking it, she's speaking it. This is America.”
He didn’t stop there. “My guess is, they’re not documented, so my next call is to ICE to have each one of them kicked out of my country,” he said. “They have the balls to come here and live off of my money? I pay for their welfare; I pay for their ability to be here. The least they could do, the least they could do is speak English.”
Shortly after King posted the video on Twitter, the man was identified as Aaron M. Schlossberg. According to Open Secrets—"the nation's premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy"—donated $500 to Trump’s political campaign in 2016. Surprise, surprise.
Schlossberg has also been spotted at a number of far-right demonstrations, including a 2017 rally that opposed American activist Linda Sarsour.
King claims he has spoken to a number of Muslim leaders who say Schlossberg “has randomly stalked and harassed them over the past few years.” King is now asking the New York State Bar Association to look into the matter.
