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A devoted Trump supporter who believes coronavirus is a hoax staged a one man protest at Bed-Stuy coffee shop this morning over their "Black Lives Matter" sign in the window.
"So, this was my morning," Rohan Singh, who took video of the confrontation, said. "I just wanted to get some coffee. But this racist ******* decided it's time to educate us and 'make a protest' about how 'all lives matter.'"
Singh had gone over to Burly Coffee/Better Read Than Dead, located on Koscuizsko Street, just after 9:30 a.m. Thursday morning when he came upon the confrontation, which was already in progress. "From what the barista told me, the man specifically walked up to complain about either the sign and/or the mask policy," Singh told Gothamist. "The barista was already trying to get the man to leave when I arrived. I stepped up and harshly told him to leave as well, but he wouldn't. So then I just started filming."
In the video, which was first posted on Reddit, the man can be heard arguing with an employee, pointing at the sign and saying, "This is the most racist thing out there, I'm not a racist...This is offensive and I want you to take off this sign."
The man in the video, Abraham "Avrumy" Knofler, confirmed to Gothamist in a phone interview that he was protesting at the coffee shop today. "I was making a protest—all lives matter," he said. Asked what he was trying to get out of this, he said, "They don't have to take it down, I just wanted to defend all lives matter." On his Twitter page, Knofler is decidedly pro-Trump, with lots of RTs of conservative figures; he also refers to coronavirus as a hoax ("#covidBS").