Are last year’s ‘restaurant wars’ kicking off again? Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) seems to think so, after he was confronted in a diner by two elderly, outraged liberals.
The Kentucky Republican was confronted by an elderly couple while dining in California on Friday. Paul’s spokesperson described the pair as “aggressive lib[eral]s.”
“You just ran into two people from New York, kiddo, and we’re not putting up with your Republican bullshit,” the woman says, after flipping off the camera.
In the background, her male partner can be heard saying “all right, we are Americans!”
Paul posted a video of the incident, saying the public should decide who was really being rude even as the left blamed incivility on President Donald Trump.
“This is why I cringe every time I see a New York license plate in Naples,” Florida talk radio host Neal Boortz tweeted in response. “This lady has issues,” another commenter wrote, “and they have nothing to do with Republicans.”
While the outspoken diner duo might consider their behavior a sacred right guaranteed by the US Constitution’s First Amendment, the encounter brings to mind the confrontations that broke out in American restaurants last summer, following the call by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-California) to “push back” against Trump administration officials in public, and the exhortation from Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) for his supporters to "get up in the face of congresspeople."
Paul himself – a libertarian-leaning Republican who has supported Trump on foreign policy though not on all domestic initiatives – was confronted in an airport last summer, and physically attacked in 2017 by a neighbor. Though the attacker was a liberal, the assault was officially explained as a “landscaping dispute” with the Kentucky lawmaker and not classified as political violence.
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