A (36:14)
And now the spiel. Excuse me if I don't excuse Marjorie Taylor Greene's excess and rhetoric, her copiously documented crazy talk, her alignment with Q and on her loose talk over gun violence against members of the House of Representatives, and of course her Jewish space lasers comments, by which I mean to be very specific, her claims that California wildfires came from lasers or beams of blue light fired by space solar generators tied to the Rothschilds. She also memed herself posing with an AR15. Besides pictures of the squad urging strong conservative Christians to go on the offensive. You're probably like me. You saw a softening of green, or at least what she put out in the public sphere, and you thought, well that's better than the undistilled version, the unexpurgated version, but still not Good. And certainly not what we want out of a public figure. And you might also have said there's a reason she's shifting. And it's not a crisis of conscience. Not really. It's politics and perhaps a little self preservation insofar as she really did genuinely get frightened by Charlie Kirk's assassination. And this takes me to Zoran Momdani. Why? Why does it. I'll tell you why. His rhetoric is not anywhere in the same ballpark as Marjorie Taylor Green's. I will definitely assure you that. Are you comparing the two? Well, I am comparing, but I am also acknowledging that the things that one says is much worse than the things the other one says. But one is my elected official, and I would say that many of the things that Zoran Momdani has said should be outside the acceptable ambit for public officials, at least ones I support. The explanation or excuse for Mamdani is that he has moderated. He gets a lot of compliments for it, in fact. So I won't compare him to Greene. I will compare him to another national politician, Kamala Harris. And one of the knocks on Kamala Harris, accurately, I think, is that she was a shape shifter. But when Zoran Mamdani goes from a defund the police position in 2020 to a I shan't defund the police posture today, it isn't called shape shifting. It's called being politically astute. So shape shifting, if it was shape shifting, that would be bad. Until shape shifting is good, when the shape that's shifted into is one we like. One that the Democratic electorate of New York City likes. But you know what I like someone who doesn't play footsie with those chanting Globalize the intifada. Someone who will critique that phrase. Someone who didn't want to defund the police at the time. And this was at the time when I, as an adult with a public platform, knew that defunding the police was a terrible idea and was either brave enough or stupid enough not to hold my tongue. So we don't like shape shifters. Well, really, we don't like when we detect them as shape shifters. Just like we don't like liars. But that's also not true. We don't like liars when we know they're lying or expose them as lying when they're telling us things we already agree with and we have no way of knowing that those things are lies, then those people are just pleasing us. People don't lie to damage their standing in other people's eyes. People lie to Elevate their standing. So we do like liars. Everyone who's ever lied has done it to gain some sort of advantage, usually an advantage of other people's opinions up until the moment that we expose them as liars. And then they become something bad, just like shape shifters. So from mom, Donnie to Green, Come with me. I'm not willing to forget all she said and all she stood for. And there's a lot more of what she said and stood for beyond what I cited. But I also note that in adding up to my assessment of her as a character and to her character as well, I think that all of her statements accrue to her detriment and they're not so loosely shaken off. And the same applies to the guy who said, when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the idf. Some portion of his constituents will say, yeah, that's great. I'm glad he said that. That's true. In referring to NYPD training exercises with the idf, like they conduct training exercises with the Singapore Police Department and Colombian armed forces and public safety officials. Some portion of the audience will hearken to those words because they hate the idf. And that rhetoric strikes them not only as poetic but true. That's some portion. A large segment will say, it doesn't matter. He's here in New York. He doesn't have control over the idf. He does, however, have ultimate authority over the nypd. The boot lacer, not the boot laced. And we know that he loathes the idf. So what is he saying about the nypd? Well, I guess at the time he was saying they are what he considers the idf, essentially an evil organization. Now I understand he's had a huge change of heart and this was way back when at a democratic socialist convention, the way distant past past of 2023. But just like Marjorie Taylor Greene, where it's easy to make these assessments and it's easy to look at the things she said and it's easy to look at what she says now and to say to ourselves, what she says now is better. But it really doesn't excuse, take her off the hook or in any way negate what she said, what kind of person she was when she said it, what kind of person she still is now, and is just taking political considerations into account. Again, both of these people, one worse than the other. But in both cases, I would prefer an elected official who never thought those things, never said those things, and never played to a crowd that would give them a big round of applause. For expressing those things. I am very much trying to be consistent intellectually, ethically, rhetorically consistent. I know I can't have everything, but I can in my own head refuse to make excuses for wild, crazy, borderline dangerous rhetoric. And even if the rhetoric is quasi or fully renounced a couple of years later, I could still hold on to and assess the kind of mind and person who uttered the rhetoric. And it really isn't a 180 get out of accountability free card to have some positions today that I also support, be those the release of the Epstein files, or funding for ACA or a plan to make my city more affordable. I have not prejudged Mom Donnie or I haven't prejudged him to the point where I'm going to tell you I think he certainly won't be a good mayor. I don't really know what he honestly thinks of his more radical positions that he expressed in the heady long ago days of 2023. But I could still set an ethical bar high for myself. And if maybe you're listening to this and you think it's a total unfair advantage that Marjorie Taylor Greene is in one camp of fascists and Zoran Mamdani is in one camp of perhaps intemperate idealists, I don't know, what do you call it when you say things that aren't true? Jewish space lasers or Rothschild space lasers? That is 0% true. The NYPD abuses being fostered by the IDF? What percent actually true? Is that 5% true? 10% true? Are you telling a story to yourself that that is just purely poetic and therefore acceptable, whereas Rothschild space lasers wasn't meant to be poetic? I think it's just working overtime to make excuses. Again, not excuses that can't be overcome by good works in office, but excuses that I still hold the utterer to account over. And it will be very interesting to see what Mamdani actually does. Not the poetry he utters, not the sentiments he professes to endorse in front of a DSA crowd. What he actually does now that he is put in charge of the nypd, an organization that he cast to some degree as being functionaries of the evil Zionist state. Putting him in charge of the NYPD is a little like putting MTG in charge of NASA. It'll be interesting.
