Democrats: Winning a Battle but Losing the War

A Revolution Brews in Brooklyn

I’ve been a Democrat my whole life — until I walked away in 2021, because it was a Democratic administration that turned America evil, and that turned my own life unconstitutionally upside down.

I have never looked back, except to marvel at how, day by day, policy by policy, today’s DNC seems ever more determined to destroy its party’s storied legacy, as well as its own ability ever to win another race.

The DNC is pursuing a wholesale, wrecking-ball destruction of everything that made people want to vote Democratic in the first place, and to send money to Democratic candidates. It trashes its heritage of speaking up for marginalized groups; for the concerns of communities of color; for unionized workers; for cops and teachers and firefighters; for ordinary Americans who struggle to pay bills; people who, as Democratic candidate and later President Bill Clinton used to say, “work hard and play by the rules.”

How a party can burn up so visibly, and so readily, so much of what we used to call “political capital”?

There is a revolution brewing in New York City and its boroughs, and it just may show a shift that can transform the nation.

New leaders are arising, who simply cannot call themselves Democrats.

This is due to self-inflicted wounds by that party, in the form of lunatic and corrupt policies, and critical abandonments from 2021-present.

Lunatic polices? Here are some:

Support the rights of gay and lesbian people, and of other sexual minorities, not to face legal discrimination? Sure; that is a no-brainer. Take that consensus to a bizarre new level, and insist on interjecting biological males into women’s sports, endangering women physically and destroying Title 9 protections; then place biological males into female spaces such as bathrooms and changing rooms, prisons and mental institutions?

Who thought that that policy would have widespread support? What percent of the electorate has that deliverable at the top of its list?

Speak up for legal immigrants to be treated as fairly as anyone else? Absolutely. Those are traditional Democratic values. But champion the ingress to our nation of 15-30 million people who broke our laws in order to be here, and then shower ostentatious benefits upon them — ranging from cash cards to four star midtown NYC hotel stays — that our American elders and veterans and single parents can never afford for themselves?

How can the advisors sitting around the Democratic campaign tables, not game out what we used to call the “optics” of that situation? How does that help any Democrat run and win?

“Defund the Police”? Who thinks that that was a good idea? A winning policy?

Offer guidance in a public health crisis, sure. But force thousands of NYC teachers, cops and firefighters, and city workers of all kinds, to take into their bodies against their will, an experimental injection that everyone sentient now knows can be damaging or sterilizing or lethal? What are the odds that that will work out longterm?

Deny religious exemptions? Really?

There are 36,000 cops in NYC and 19,000 NYPD staff. There are 11,000 firefighters and 4500 EMTs in NYC. There are 77 thousand teachers in NYC. So a total of 147,400 New Yorkers in the front lines of New Yorkers’ lives, and of their kids’ wellbeing, were “mandated” with the experimental injection.

What if they get sick? What if they die? What if they know others who are getting sick and dying?

Who wants to “own” that catastrophe electorally?

The DNC does.

To this day, first responders in NYC who were “mandated”, do not have their jobs back. They do not have due process,. They did not get their day in court. The people on whose bodies the city runs, were betrayed.

Who isn’t sorry? The DNC. Who isn’t offering to “reinstate and compensate” these workers? The DNC’s new star, the “new AOC”, New York State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani.

He is a poster child for the corruption of the DNC, and its betrayal of first responders and communities of color; traditionally stalwart groups in the Democratic base.

Mamdani is to the manor born. A Bowdoin college graduate, son of the glamorous Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, Mamdani’s family lives in Uganda, where Mandani was recently married. Indian media are reporting this event as a “lavish Uganda wedding bash”. “New York City mayoral frontrunner and current Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani celebrated his recent marriage with a three-day private celebration at his family's high-security estate in Uganda”, reports DNA_India.

In New York City media, in contrast, Mamdani poses in a hoodie on the subway:

Trust fund millennials in gentrified neighborhoods in New York, are salivating about Mamdani. In a gesture, voting for Mamdani wipes away the guilt of “white privilege”; no matter than he himself is more privileged than almost anyone in New York’s five boroughs.

Mamdani is a true socialist candidate: he offers to make New York life “affordable.” Free transit for all; government-run grocery stores — (which worked so well in the Soviet Union); frozen rents. It is a seductive appeal; New York is expensive; and Mamdani can hope that people under 60 do not remember what socialism actually did to those suffering under its yoke.

His candidacy definitely depends upon no one asking where all the money is going to come from, or noticing that when “the government” pays for it, it is taxpayers who actually pay.

Headlines from Politico to Newsweek are broadcasting the “fact” that Mamdani polled at 50 per cent, far above his competitors. But read the not-so-fine print (as Politico’s and Newsweek’s editors should have done, more carefully):

‘“Our independent poll — the first in this cycle to be offered in four languages and to drill down into national origin and religious denomination — makes one thing clear: Black union households, young Jews, South Asians, East Asians, Latinos, and New Yorkers in every income bracket are all on the same Zohran Mamdani bus, and it’s headed in the direction of the Democratic Party’s future,” said Amit Singh Bagga, the principal of Public Progress Solutions and a veteran of federal, city, and state government.

Bagga’s firm designed and analyzed the poll along with Adam Carlson’s Zenith Research. It was funded through private donations to Bagga, who advised Mamdani’s campaign during the primary on setting up an administration, and was fielded by Verasight.”

So: a poll handpicked the most likely Mamdani voters, left out the likely Mamdani non-supporters, his donors funded it, and legacy media is calling that a win. Both polling and news reporting could not be more corrupt than this.

In contrast to Mamdani and his theatrical structure of institutional alliances, a new generation of very different leaders in New York City, is also running for office. These young men and women had very different life experiences from Mamdani’s. They were not born to wealth or privilege; their families do not live on “lavish estates” in foreign countries.

The corrupt, institutional machine of New York City politics, is not helping them; the legacy media of New York City are not championing them.

Some of these new leaders have walked away from the Democratic party. They have re-registered as Republicans, which is in itself newsworthy. But these are not your grandma’s country club Republicans.

Athena Clarke, a New York City teacher who was “mandated” out of her job when she refused to take the experimental injection, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and the West Indies, and a mother of one, is running for city council in Brooklyn’s District 46. (Disclosure: DailyClout.io will run sponsored content from her supporters). She has an BA and an MA in education, specializing in children with disabilities.

For seven years Clarke worked as a tenured teacher in the New York City Department of Education. But in 2021, the city implemented a COVID-19 vaccine mandate. When Ms Clarke refused it, she was terminated from her job, without any court hearing, which is a violation of New York State Education Law.

This trauma led her to decide to run for City Council, and to seek reinstatement for first responders and teachers, among other planks on her platform.

Unlike Mamdani, she is not promising free everything. (One of her slogans is “Stop the Socialists!”)

I interviewed Clarke, and it was a different experience from interviewing a seasoned pol. She spoke from the perspective of a teacher and of a mom. She talked about the kids injured developmentally from being kept out of school for months; children alone in a room, socially isolated, staring at monitors. She talked about how kids with speech disabilities could not learn how to pronounce the sounds “l” or “th” without seeing their teacher’s mouths, which were hidden behind masks.

Her platform has other grassroots concerns. Parental rights is one of them; she is tackling the delicate issue of parents being unaware that children are exposed at public schools to “sensitive content,” often without their consent. She promises to take on the bureaucracy: Brooklyn often simply changes zoning, and imposes drug treatment clinics, homeless shelters, mental health facilities and other problematic institutions into local neighborhoods, especially in lower-income areas, without any local buy-in or approval process. Clarke promises to end that. She will also “reinstate and compensate” the terminated city workers who were “mandated” and who lost their jobs when they refused the vaccine.

Luis Quero is another Brooklyn-born and raised next-generation leader. He is running for Brooklyn City Council, District 38. He is sort of an anti-Mamdani.

His website is startlingly direct. “You just want to get to work without getting stabbed or burned alive”, it reads. “There is no Democratic or Republican way of cleaning the streets,” it notes, quoting legendary New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Quero’s platform is not the traditional Democratic or Republican platform. He, like Clarke, objects to the distribution of mental health and drug addiction clinics throughout Brooklyn. “No New Shelters or Drug Clinics: These facilities have been crammed into our community with few opened in wealthier neighborhoods like Tribeca or Soho. Sunset Park alone has seen a 68% increase in Felonious Assaults and 35% increase in Rape in 2024 when compared to the last 14 years (NYPD Compstat 72 Precinct 12/29/2024).” Quero also rejects the role of many non-profit organizations, which, he argues, tend to want to manage poverty and homelessness forever — justifying their own budgets — rather than to solve those problems.

I interviewed Quero as well. He is as passionate as Clarke, with the grumpiness of a young man who has seen firsthand in his own neighborhood — he is a Brooklyn native, though a Columbia University graduate — everything that does not work. Quero said that black and brown young people in Brooklyn see that the good entry- level service jobs have been sent overseas, and that illegal immigrants have been mobilized by Uber and Doordash and other corporations, to take the delivery jobs that used to be open to them.

Quero calls for the training of those young Brooklynites in IT, robotics and AI — the skills of the future — as well as in high-paid trades: plumbing, electrical, construction. Quero told me that some of the angriest Brooklynites from whom he hears, are Latino voters who arrived here the right way and spent years, and thousands of dollars, getting their green cards and their citizenships legally. They are furious at the Democrats for ushering in the millions who have, as they put it, “jumped the line” illegally.

The interviews I had with Clarke and Quero made me consider how badly and unethically the DNC has bungled the relationship with many black and brown voters; how actually racist the DNC has been and continues to be.

The tactic of throwing telegenic brown people with inch-deep qualifications — AOC, Kamala Harris, Zohran Mamdani — at the camera, and calling that “social justice”, is just not a reliable vote-getter any more, nor should it be.

I think that many black and brown voters, formerly reliably Democratic, were deeply insulted by the Harris campaign. I think that the recoiling of many black and brown, including Latino, voters away from the spectacle of illegal immigration policies that obviously hand corporations serf-level workers, at the expense of these voters’ own jobs, is a revulsion that is being felt across the country.

It will be fascinating to see how these new Republicans find traction, or don’t, in this new, fractured landscape.

In Clarke and Quero, and in contrast, in Mamdani, we see a battle that is a Rorschach test for the whole country.

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Then there is the fact that the Democratic leadership essentially abandoned the issues of the first responders of New York. That is also a huge big deal, and a major self-inflicted wound.

This betrayal should also go down in history; and it should also be a turning point electorally.

I met many of the firefighters, cops and teachers who had been laid off of work in 2021, for not taking the experimental injection, when I spoke at a rally to support them.

Ninety-one per cent of the first responders in NYC took the experimental injection; the ones who refused, as noted above, lost access to their jobs, their income, their seniority, their benefits.

In the “lockdown” years, I met Michael Kane, the charismatic and hardworking organizer of Teachers for Choice, a laid-off Long Island educator.

I met firefighter Sophy Medina: an amazing young woman. A mom of two, a courageous firefighter, a fighter for human rights — the kind of superstar role model NYC would champion in ordinary, sane times; beautiful and strong and principled. In 2021, her body, as well as her colleagues’ bodies, which they put into danger for our sakes every day, was considered by the city to be worth nothing.

Firefighters resisted this injustice against them all: they protested outside Gracie Mansion, the Mayor’s residence, against the mandate: they bore signs reading “Essential Heroes Aren’t Disposable.”

I was upset at their plight. I was moved to have had the chance to do what I could to help; because New York’s first responders have been an important part of my, and my family’s, lives in the city.

When I got back to Manhattan a few days after 9/11 — believe it or not, I had to take a cab from Canada because all the flights were grounded — I re-entered a devastating scenario, of course. The air was thick with the stench of powdered bodies. There is no other way to say it.

People’s ashes seeped into every air conditioner; people’s ashes lay on surfaces.

The city mourned the firefighters who had so bravely run into burning and collapsing buildings, even as everyone who could get out, was running in the other direction.

At Squad 18, across the street from where we lived, there was eventually a plaque commemorating the lost firefighters.

For years we remembered, in New York City, what we owed to the firefighters.

Whenever I speak at a First Responders’ event, I almost cry. That is because I was a single mom for twelve years. And the firefighters were right across the street.

We could see them.

Though I had relationships at various times, I did not have a man in the house whose primary role was to protect my children physically if, God forbid, there were a physical emergency. That is a vulnerability that goes beyond most human vulnerabilities.

But I never felt unsafe, and my kids never felt unsafe. Why?

Because there was Squad 18, awake, or ready to wake, whenever we went to sleep. And I knew, and the children knew, that Squad 18 would keep us safe.

Down at Squad 18, as the years passed and my children grew up, we would watch the pile of flowers grow, every year, on September 11.

People who knew the lost firefighters, and those who did not, but who understood what they had been to our city, our neighborhood, would pass by to pay their respects, and gently lay a bouquet of white daisies, or bright yellow chrysanthemums, onto the pile.

The families of the lost firefighters would congregate outside Squad 18, on September 11, every year, and see old friends, remember their loved ones, and no doubt reminisce. You saw the widows.

My kids grew, and the lost firefighters’ kids grew.

I thought of the families: it is not only the first responders but their families who are heroes. The wives, and even the older children, know that when dad or mom rushes out to the sound of sirens, the firefighters are putting their bodies at risk for the sake of other people’s wives and children; and that the parents may never come back.

I got to know the firefighters, as I say, from 2021 to the present. And they are — different from most people. They are — I’ll just say it — better than most people. They are modest and humble and funny and lowkey. But they are also — slightly Christlike.

They have that quality that people have, who put themselves into harm’s way for others’ sake.

These people choose to risk themselves for others.

How many of us do that?

How many of us would do that?

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In the battle unfolding now in New York City, we will see what the Democratic Party really prizes. We will see if the Republican Party can really grow and change, and include new gifts and perspectives and talents.

We will see, in the candidates’ and parties’ treatment of the First Responders and teachers, if the city has a memory at all.

If the city has a heart at all.

And we will see if something new, something possibly lasting; a different voice, a different alignment —

May be emerging,

From the betrayal

And the loss

And the chaos.