After Pittsburgh Massacre, DeSantis Calls On
Gillum To Disavow Anti-Israel Organization
In the aftermath of the deadly shooting massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis renewed his call for Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum to publicly disavow the anti-Israel Dream Defenders organization.
“He will not disavow them because this is who he is,” stated DeSantis, speaking in an exclusive interview with this reporter. “I mean when they are saying he is part of the movement they are not lying. He is one of them.”
The candidate not only called for Gillum to disavow Dream Defenders, DeSantis challenged his opponent to demand that the organization stop aiding Gillum’s election efforts from the outside.
DeSantis stated that “not only have they (Dream Defenders) endorsed him and they are helping him, but he endorsed them from the debate stage just a few months ago in the Democratic primaries. He did it unprompted.”
Indeed, Gillum was taped at a June debate saying that he is “pleased and proud” to have sneaked food to Dream Defenders activists during a 30-day sleep-in protest at the Florida State Capital, referring to a 2013 month-long anti-gun protest in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. “I hope you keep at it,” Gillum said of Dream Defenders activists during a June event.
“I would never accept an endorsement from a group whose mission was to boycott Israel,” DeSantis told this reporter. “And I certainly wouldn’t offer them my endorsement in any way, shape or form.”
Dream Defenders’ mission is “deplorable across-the-board,” DeSantis charged.
Continued DeSantis:
“I mean, they are definitely anti-Israel. I would say they are anti-Semitic because they embrace the BDS movement which is anti-Semitic and I am not aware of Dream Defenders trying to boycott any other country in the world. Not Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. Not any of these other rogue states. It is the world’s only Jewish state that they seek to boycott.
“And they actually sponsored trips to go to Israel and they do these flash mobs and they protest Israel. It is really, really bad. That is just one of the things. They want to replace capitalism with principles that are so radical they would make Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro blush. And that is something that Gillum signed his name to.
“And I am just thinking to myself the people who stormed the beaches of Normandy to defeat the Nazis, they were not bullies. They saved the world. And America’s military has been a force for good. And yet for Dream Defenders, they think that America is a bully and that we need to radically reduce defense spending. So just across-the-board they are just so radical and just offensive certainly to most people in Florida who are good.”
Gillum’s Days At Radical Youth Training Organization
Additionally, Gillum served as the director of a radical youth training organization, whose mission was to challenge America’s “predatory capitalism,” abolish the prison system, fight a “spiritual resistance” battle against “Christian hegemony,” redefine the meaning of “borders” while aiding “undocumented” aliens, and enact the “collective liberation” of “communities of color” amid what it described as the scourge of “white supremacy.”
Gillum’s group accused the U.S. of being a “colonialist” power perpetrating “structural violence” and “continued genocide.” It claimed conservatives in the U.S. judicial system were “justifying white supremacist policing practices.”
All of that extremist rhetoric and more was posted on the official “issues” sections of the organization’s website while Gillum not only served as its active director, but while his picture, position and bio were brandished on the same site on the “staff” page.
In his position of youth leadership director at PFAW (People for the American Way), Gillum was in charge of both YP4, the organization’s youth training program, and the organization’s Young Elected Officials (YEO) Network, which he founded and which describes itself as “the first national program singularly-focused on providing a network of support to young progressive state and local elected officials.”
The organization in question is Young People For, or YP4, one of two youth training groups that Gillum directed and oversaw while he worked at the George Soros-financed People for the American Way, or PFAW, as field organizer in 2002 and then Director of Youth Leadership Programs from 2005 until January 13, 2017. He departed PFAW just ahead of his gubernatorial run.
A Breitbart News investigation found that even while he was a Tallahassee city commissioner and later the city’s mayor, Gillum was heavily involved in the controversial YP4 youth leadership program as youth director, announcing multiple hires and headlining fundraising and group events.