Mud’s been thrown in the District 30 City Council race, but who has the moral high ground?
I am a writer and a homeowner living in City Council District 30, which represents Middle Village, Maspeth, Glendale, and parts of Ridgewood, Woodhaven, and Woodside.
Pretty dull intro, right? Right. Not many people outside of my district care about this city council race, which has Juan Ardila challenging the incumbent Bob Holden.
The New York Post, though, found a reason to care. It splashed a scandalous story in its pages about how the Ardila had posted several homophobic and racist slurs on his Facebook page ten years ago, when he was still a teenager.
Ardila, who boasted endorsements from groups like the LGBT club the Stonewall Democrats of New York, was quick to apologize. “I fully understand how wrong and hurtful that language is and I wholeheartedly apologize,” Ardila, 27, said.
That might have been the end of it, but Holden, whom The Post identified as a moderate, fumed at Ardila's egregious teen behavior. Holden called Ardila’s apology “contrived” and "meaningless” since it apparently came too late.
But then Holden went further: “There is no place anywhere in the Democratic Party, on the New York City Council or in the City of New York for the kind of racist, homophobic, misogynistic language that Mr. Ardila has publicly posted on social media.”
Hold on. Now this is interesting. I've been following Holden’s career since his slender political victory as a Republican nominee in 2017, and an enormous question loomed for me after I read his indignant response: Has the Bob Holden of 2021 forgotten everything about the Bob Holden of the past ten years?
Since Ardila’s behavior was suddenly under the microscope, it seems only fair to go through Holden's just-as-recent past. Holden was the managing editor of Middle Village's glossy Juniper Berry Magazine from the summer of 2011 through the spring of 2017. For most of this time, Holden was in his 60s, as he is now 69 years old.
So what sort of things did Holden publish as a magazine editor (and, it should be stressed, as an adult)? Since the local media hasn't investigated, I started digging on my own.
I was able to find twenty copies of the magazine that spanned that time period. Given that the magazine is published quarterly, I was only missing a few issues in which Holden’s name appeared at the top of the editorial masthead. I tried to obtain a copy of every issue, but due to complications created by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Queens Public Library was unable to retrieve them all.
Here is what I learned: As the magazine’s top editor, Bob Holden allowed racist, homophobic, and Islamophobic content to be published by local op-ed writers, not just occasionally but on a regular basis. And while he did print letters to the editor complaining about the bigoted content of his magazine, there is no evidence that Holden sought op-ed columns from guest writers that offered more inclusive viewpoints.
Let’s look at some samples. Let’s have all the information before we cast our votes for the District 30 city council seat.
See the below image. Holden published in the summer of 2011 an op-ed written by Patrick McCarthy titled “Islamerica.” In the essay McCarthy declared that “violence is an integral part of Islam before comparing it negatively to Christianity. Interestingly enough, in the years since that op-ed was published, both the FBI and the Justice Department published significant reports identifying white nationalist groups as posing much bigger threats to America than Islamic terrorists.
See the below image. Holden published in the fall 2011 issue an op-ed by the Catholic priest Nicholas A. DiMarzio. The Rev. DiMarzio was writing to bemoan the end of American civilization because same-sex marriage had been legalized in the state of New York. “ I must confess that I am rather ashamed to be a New Yorker after the spectacle that the same-sex marriage passage revealed...he writes. This wasn't the only op-ed in Juniper Berry that opposed same-sex marriage, another one was printed four full years later. I couldn't find any examples of Holden allowing op-eds that supported the decision.
See the below image. Holden published anti-immigrant articles frequently in Juniper Berry. In the spring 2012 issue, for example, an op-ed “The Enemy Within” by Dan Trembinski was published. Trembinski managed to combine Islamophobia with racism and fears of undocumented workers when he was allowed by Holden to actually use all-caps as part of his fact-free argument. Just...read it yourself:
See the below image. Holden published in the fall 2012 issue an op-ed written by Patrick McCarthy titled “Who is President Obama?” McCarthy raises the Obama birther conspiracy issue. If you recall, rightwing extremists had been falsely questioning the first black President’s Hawaiian birth certificate ever since he was first elected in 2008; Donald Trump seized on the issue in 2011 to gain national attention among Republicans. Here, McCarthy uses language right out of a white nationalist handbook to coyly discuss Obama’s origins:
Holden, who is running as a Democrat this year and prominently bills himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” published not only Obama birther conspiracy theories as the top editor of Juniper Berry, he also published numerous anti-Hillary essays that repeated disproven Benghazi conspiracy theories. I found no evidence that Holden ever encountered a Democrat he's actually liked, in fact.
See the below image. Holden published in the summer 2015 issue an op-ed by Rick Hayes in which Hayes asks why “minorities continue to vote for a [Democratic] party that has systematically destroyed them for the past 50 years?” Hayes answers his own wildly overblown question by comparing welfare-dependent minorities to drug addicts, a metaphor that raises its own racist imagery of inner-city crackheads and inner-city violence.
See the below image. Holden published in the summer of 2015 this gem of socioeconomic classist misogyny by Christina Wilkinson, who became the editor of the magazine after Holden left the post. According to Wilkinson, poor people are having too many babies because the government rewards them through the welfare system, so the only answer is to cut entitlements. This screed came in a special issue devoted to protesting the proposed homeless shelter that was going to be established in Glendale:
A Pattern of Editorial Content
Examples like these would not amount to much if they were, say, published in The New York Times, as The Times regularly publishes lots of content on a daily basis, and allows a very wide range of views in its opinion pages. However, these essays were all published in a quarterly magazine out of Middle Village in Queens, with each issue averaging only 80 to 90 pages. What's more, there is no evidence that the magazine ever sought wider, alternative opinions in his publication: Bob Holden's Juniper Berry stayed in one lane and one lane only by publishing toxic op-eds that appealed to the far right.
Perhaps The New York Post can get a new comment from Holden now. I personally would like to know, in light of these findings, if Holden thinks there "is a place anywhere in the Democratic Party, on the New York City Council or in the City of New York" for him, or if he holds himself to a different standard than his city council rival Juan Ardila.