At least one business owner has no time for having his customers being given the Maxine Waters treatment.
A bookstore owner in Richmond called the police upon a woman screaming at former Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon in his store.
Nick Cooke, owner of Black Swan Books, told the Richmond Times Dispatch that he made the 911 call Saturday afternoon in defense of Mr. Bannon after an unnamed woman called him a “piece of trash.”
“Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business. I asked her to leave, and she wouldn’t. And I said, ’I’m going to call the police if you don’t,’ and I went to call the police and she left,” Mr. Cooke told the newspaper. “And that’s the end of the story.”
The Richmond Police Department told the Times Dispatch that it had received a call about, in the newspaper’s words, “someone yelling at a political figure” but did not send any officers because the call was quickly canceled.
Mr. Cooke would not tell the Times Dispatch whether Mr. Bannon, a native of the Virginia capital, often frequents the store. But he said it wouldn’t matter because the nature of his business does not allow for public bullying.
“We are a bookshop. Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions and not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening,” he told the paper.
Several Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials have been heckled in public or refused service or had their homes targeted in the last few weeks, some of it at the incitement of Mrs. Waters, a Democratic U.S. House member from Los Angeles.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome any more, anywhere,” she told a cheering crowd last month.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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