Nancy Bostock is not a fan of Rick Kriseman‘s Twitter feed.
After more than 2,000 people shared and liked the St. Pete Mayor’s tweet Monday night joking that Donald Trump should be banned from St. Petersburg based on his hateful anti-Muslim rhetoric, Bostock, a former Pinellas County School Board member and former county commissioner, took to Facebook to condemn the Mayor’s statement.
“It isn’t the poorly conceived humor directed at Trump that scares me … Trump asks for it … and frankly probably enjoys it,” Bostock wrote. “It’s the intolerance of divergent opinions in the name of ‘tolerance’ that scares me. Orwellian double-think at its best. I mean its worst.”
“Trump has the right to his opinion and we have the right to disagree – and even to make bad jokes about it,” Bostock continued. “But when an elected Mayor states that the city he represents isn’t a place for ‘those kinds of positions,’ (and by implication the people who hold them,) I fear the coming of ‘our new happy life.’”
Bostock explained further in a phone interview that her dissent of Kriseman’s tweet had nothing to do with Trump’s statement suggesting all Muslims be banned from entering the U.S., but rather a larger issue.
Several commenters posted in response to Bostock’s statement that Trump’s latest was particularly hate-filled and dangerous. She agreed that the assertion was “over-the-top,” but to imply a person is not welcome in a particular city because their views contradict that of a Mayor is particularly dangerous.
“Who gets to decide what those positions are?” Bostock said. “There are all different shades of positions.”
Kriseman, though, tweeted and was later quoted explaining that he was “answering ridiculousness with ridiculousness.”
“The Mayor’s tweet was sarcastic,” spokesman Ben Kirby said. “But it was an answer to Trump’s comments, which we should take seriously. Those comments were hateful and xenophobic.”
“St. Pete is a city of opportunity for all and that means everyone,” Kirby said. “That’s not just a St. Pete value, that’s an American value.”
