Ugliness in Mendham, NJ - Rick Blood Resigns

Ex-Deputy Mayor Rick Blood faces criticism after
a Mendham Township Committee meeting Monday

It's not easy to be constantly reminded of the insidious trail of slime left behind by the Trump campaign and his subsequent so-called presidency like some kind of toxic hate-filled slug that's dragged it's ugly carcass across the American landscape.

(No offense to actual slugs.)

Garden State politicians, from former Republican governor Chris Christie, to current Democratic U.S. Senator Corey Booker often cite the fact that my current home state of New Jersey is one of the most diverse states in America.

But as an ugly incident in Mendham Township, NJ on Sunday night reminds us, that doesn't make it some kind of Utopia.

Mendham, the home of former NJ governor Chris Christie, is a heavily-Republican suburban community in Morris County - the stronghold of the New Jersey Tea Party base, the latest Census data breaks Mendham demographics down to 85% white, 12% foreign-born and 1% African-American.

As William Westhoven reported in an article for the Daily Record early Tuesday morning, Mendham Township Deputy Mayor Rick Blood (pictured above) resigned in a special closed session at the end of heated 3-hour Mendham Township Committee meeting on Monday evening.

The meeting was dominated by calls for Blood's removal from office in the wake of his decision to post a bizarre, xenophobic, hate-filled article that compared immigrants to "rabid, messy, mean raccoons" on his Facebook page on Sunday night - he tried to delete the post but it's already gone viral.

Anti-racist protesters address the Mendham Township
meeting Monday night

According to Westhoven's article the vile racist rant is apparently something that has been passed back and forth between Trump supporters since 2016.

It justifies Trump's ignorance, bigotry and hatred for immigrants by likening them to coming home and discovering a basement filled with "rabid" raccoons that can only be removed by an "exterminator".

No need to guess who the "exterminator" is.

If you're interested, Rob Jennings' NJ.com article has the text of the neo-Nazi diatribe that Blood posted to his Facebook page - which was obviously written at the height of Trump's anti-immigrant fear rallies during the 2016 presidential campaign.

I first heard about this story during a segment on the Brian Lehrer Show on Tuesday morning, and it's definitely worth a listen as Brian has Mendham Township residents call in, and he also has former "Christie Tracker" journalist Matt Katz on as well.

Katz's wife, who is Jewish, comes from the nearby town of Randolph, and he speaks to some of the anti-Semitic allegations about Mendham Township.

In fact one female caller who said she was Jewish and relocated to the area with her husband claims there's a "quiet understanding" that real estate agents won't show Mendham Township homes to prospective buyers who are Jewish, and instead try and "steer" them to nearby communities.

Another caller described the community as a "conservative cocoon", insulated from other more diverse nearby communities like Morristown.

Democratic Mendham Township Committee
member Amelia Duarte 

It's hard to unpack all that and verify such comments in such a short time, but if you read some of the comments published in the Daily Record article that Mendham Township residents gave at the meeting on Monday night it's clear that a sizable and significant portion of the population were disgusted by Rick Blood's comments, demanded his resignation and emphasized that the words in the post he shared do not represent the entire community.

After blogging about Republican efforts to unfairly rig elections on the state and local level last Friday, I think it's of interest to note that several of the 70-some attendees at the Mendham Township meeting pointed out that Rick Blood, a Republican (in case you didn't guess...) was not actually elected to be Deputy Mayor.

He was appointed to the position on the committee back in December (by a group of Republicans...) a month after loosing a race for an open committee seat to Amelia Duarte (pictured above) - a Democrat whose parents came to this country from the Dominican Republic.

So Blood basically lost a race for a seat in a heavily-Republican town to a Democrat - but Republicans simply appointed him to the committee a month later anyway - talk about sketchy Republican math.

On Monday night Duarte was the one member of the Mendham Township Committee to call on Blood to resign - a move the Republican-majority committee later agreed to in a closed session after hours of testimony by residents outraged over the comments Rick Blood posted online.

I'm not sure if I'd call that Karma, but I do think it's yet another reflection of American voter's repudiation of Trump and his divisive message of hatred, bigotry and "otherism".

Time will tell if this is a snapshot for what's in store for the upcoming mid-term elections.

But the fact remains that the majority of the 70-some residents who came out for that Mendham Township meeting on a Monday night in a heavily-Republican district (including Tamara Harris, the Democratic candidate for the NJ 11th Congressional District), overwhelmingly rejected the extremist pro-Trump claptrap that Rick Blood posted on social media.

And they called for him to be removed from his seat.

That oughta tell you something about how American voters around the country are feeling right now.