Keep New York City From Becoming New Marx City

October 10, 2025 By Robin M. Itzler

If you’re in New York or would like to donate to a New York mayoral candidate, there’s only one serious candidate who hasn’t caused thousands to die (that would be Andrew Cuomo) and isn’t allied to a political ideology that has historically caused tens of millions of people to die (i.e., Zohran Mamdani). The man who should win, of course, is Curtis Sliwa.

Americans who follow elections will carefully search their ballot to find the candidate of their choice. According to several studies, almost everyone else focuses on the top two or three names and selects the candidate from their party. Positioning on a ballot matters...a lot!

Image created using AI.

The New York City Board of Elections has announced the order in which candidates will appear on the November 4 ballot. Note that two leading candidates are listed twice, and, although Eric Adams and Jim Walden dropped out, they remain listed on the ballot. Also, two candidates no one ever heard of (nor raised money or campaigned) are listed ahead of Andrew Cuomo.

• Zohran Kwame Mamdani—Democrat Party
• Curtis A. Sliwa—Republican Party
• Irene Estrada—Conservative Party (Raised little money and has not done any campaigning.)
• Zohran Kwame Mamdani—Working Families Party (aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America Party)
• Curtis A. Sliwa—Protect Animals Party
• Eric L. Adams—Safe & Affordable/End Anti-Semitism Party (Under New York’s rules, his name remains on the ballot although he has dropped out.)
• Joseph Hernandez—Quality of Life candidate (Raised little money and has not done any campaigning.)
• Andrew M. Cuomo—Fight and Deliver Party, former Democrat governor
• Jim Walden – Integrity Party (Under New York’s rules, his name remains on the ballot although he has dropped out.)

According to a UC San Diego report published in December 2024, New York City ranked 49th for turnout among U.S. major cities. New York City is comprised of five boroughs: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island, with the island being the most conservative. (Personal note: Robin was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and married and lived one year on Staten Island before she and her husband moved to California, once worked in Manhattan across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and skipped the Bronx except when driving up to the beautiful Catskill Mountains. She knows New York City.)

The City, an online site focusing on New York issues, analyzed the 2021 mayoral race that elected Eric Adams:

Of the more than 4.9 million active registered voters for the general election that year, only 1.147 million cast votes, according to the CFB data. That’s just 23% of eligible city dwellers who actually exercised their right to vote.

[snip]

Manhattan had the highest voter turnout during the 2021 primary, with 33.4%. The highest voter turnout in the general election, though, was the Republican stronghold Staten Island, with 33.7% voting.

The borough with the lowest turnout for the primary and the general was The Bronx — 19.1% came out in June and 17.5% voted in November. Brooklyn’s primary turnout was 27.5%, and Queens had 25%; their general turnout were both above 22%.

The excitement for the communist Muslim Mamdani comes from the downwardly mobile—those who want others to pay for their basic needs. Should the communist win, New York City (like other blue cities) will see the rich and middle-class leave. It’s been happening in the Big Apple for decades and will accelerate.

In 1965, 128 Fortune 500 firms were headquartered in New York City. Today, it’s about 50 firms. Texas boasts 54 Fortune 500 companies, and Florida has 22. There are many memes of Florida calling Mamdani ‘realtor of the year.’

New Yorkers should rally around Curtis Sliwa. After all, when you think of someone who repeatedly stands up for New York’s working and middle-class residents, Sliwa’s name is among the first that comes to mind. He founded the now international Guardian Angels to protect New Yorkers when no one else cared – sort of how things are today. Every borough’s Republican Party has endorsed Sliwa, along with the Rockland County GOP. Former Republican New York Governor George Pataki was one of Sliwa’s earliest endorsements.

Sliwa’s campaign is projecting its strongest fundraising stretch so far, reporting more than $421,000 raised in the last filing period. Moreover, he is gaining endorsements from both sides of the aisle. For instance, Democrat Assembly Member Jamie Williams and Democrat Council Member Robert Holden have endorsed the Republican Sliwa. Holden touts the Guardian Angels founder’s “decades of public service and straight talk.” He adds,

He (Sliwa) built the Guardian Angels into a global public safety force. He has walked the streets, ridden the subways, and stood with victims when no one else would. His campaign has grassroots support, a serious platform, and the toughness to govern.

Why would anyone want former New York Democrat Governor Andrew Cuomo, famous for “murdering” elderly nursing home residents during the “scamdemic?” Speaking on The View on October 6, Andrew Cuomo focused on...President Trump:

Mamdani is a gift for him (President Trump) — a gift. He wants Mamdani, for two reasons. One, going into the midterms, he will take a picture of Mamdani, run around the country and say, ‘Here is what happened to the Democrats. They are now communists, they hate the police, they legalize prostitution, legalize drugs, they want to elect this Democrat, no experience whatsoever — being mayor of New York would be his first real job.

At this point, the only debate is whether Mamdani is a socialist or a communist. Ayn Rand explained the difference:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.

Cuomo’s ballot position, at the bottom behind someone who didn’t campaign and who has no name recognition, is going to hurt him. The choice is now between a communist who has a platform to the left of Karl Marx and a man who has spent his entire life trying to make New York City a place where people can safely live and work. New Yorkers should elect Curtis Sliwa.

Click here for an AI-generated: Commietown – The Musical. Sliwa’s campaign site is here.

Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter. Robin can be reached at PatriotNeighbors@yahoo.com.

Cuomo Quits Over Cuomosexuality, Gets Away With Cuomocide

Daniel Greenfield August 12, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

All over Southeast Asia, there are women and little girls bent over sewing machines in sweatshops churning out “Cuomosexual” t-shirts that no leftist letch will buy anymore.

You can't buy a Confederate flag on Amazon, or a copy of a book challenging transgender identity, but the site is littered with $20 "I Identify as Cuomosexual" t-shirts and rainbow Cuomosexual face masks. Like Andrew Cuomo, his Cuomosexual crap has no future.

Now all the Cuomosexuals know just what identifying as a Cuomosexual really means.

You can use your $285 “Cuomo for President” cashmere sweater to wrap the shattered pieces of your “Crushin’ on Cuomo” coffee mug, and use it to mug somebody on 5th Avenue.

Last year, former Governor Cuomo endorsed tearing down President Teddy Roosevelt’s statue. Now his cult of personality icons are the ones falling on his walk of shame out of Albany.

Not so long ago, they worshiped him.

The Television Academy gave him an Emmy, the Washington Post compared him to FDR, and a poll showed him leading the field of potential presidential candidates in 2024.

Now it might as well be 2224.

Andrew Cuomo has many post-resignation career options. Former Governor Eliot Spitzer briefly became a CNN host, former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is a meditation teacher, and Anthony Weiner sells countertops. If Cuomo applies himself, he too can sell countertops.

Like a cornered rat, Andrew Cuomo tried to do everything he could to stay in office. He blustered, he threatened, and tried to cut deals. But all the fellow rats he had climbed over on his way to the top got up on their hind legs and toppled the Beast of 138 Eagle Street.

It’s not the first time in the rat-eat-rat politics of New York.

Former Governor Eliot Spitzer refused to resign, claiming that his hooker habits were a “private matter”, until, like Cuomo, he was threatened with impeachment forcing him to get out.

His blind black replacement, Lt. Governor David Paterson, swore he wouldn’t give up the governor’s mansion, vowing, “The only way I'm not going to be governor next year is at the ballot box and the only way I'll be leaving office before is in a box." He left in disgrace after a covert dirty campaign waged in the media by his sociopathic successor: Andrew Cuomo.

The race is on to replace Cuomo with another scumbag who will quit before being impeached.

Cuomo wasn’t just afraid of impeachment. There are much worse things lurking in his closet than the knobby grabby hands and the maniacal leer that splits his leathery face. The Democrats didn’t want to open that door and neither did Andrew Cuomo. Call it a cover-up.

That’s what it is.

Andrew Cuomo brought half a century of Cuomo clan politics to an end with his shameful resignation. Ever since Mario Cuomo ran for office in 1974, there’s been a Cuomo robbing taxpayers somewhere in New York or D.C. Before Mario lost his last race, he got his son Andrew a job as HUD Secretary in the Clinton administration as a payoff for not opposing him.

A world without Cuomos is almost as unthinkable for New York as a world without Kennedys for Massachusetts. The two inbred political clans even briefly intermarried when Andrew Cuomo wed one of RFK’s daughters as part of his presidential ambitions. Those are as dead as the thousands of senior citizens who perished after Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept hospital patients infected with the coronavirus while blaming the outbreak on the Jews.

The Clinton cabinet is where Andrew first began to be accused of sexual harassment (while the sexual harasser in chief covered for him) and where he became the “Father of the Subprime Crisis” which helped cause the economic recession of 2008 that brought Obama to power.

Biden praised Cuomo for having done "one hell of a job". He’s right.

Between the 15,000 nursing home coronavirus deaths in New York and the 2008 economic crisis, Cuomo may have done the most damage of any politician not in the White House.

If Andrew Cuomo had not existed, the history of the last two decades might have been very different and the Obama and Biden administrations might not have become terrible realities.

But unfortunately he did exist and he didn’t resign for any of his real crimes, but for sexual harassment which is practically a rite of passage for New York Democrats.

When New York Democrats aren’t stealing, they’re groping, or they’re doing both at once.

Eliot Spitzer, the last Democrat governor to come into office through direct elections, stepped down for sexual misconduct. Cuomo’s predecessor as attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, resigned after being accused of choking women, but a Cuomo appointee refused to prosecute him. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer tanked his mayoral campaign after being accused of sexual harassment. Former mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner had sexted a 15-year-old girl.

Vito J. Lopez, the chair of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, had to resign for groping female staffers. Micah Z. Kellner, a bisexual Schumer crony, lost his political career over sexual harassment and had to divorce his wife, Anthony Weiner's former chief of staff.

In New York politics, it’s scumbags all the way down.

Cuomo’s resignation isn’t justice. It’s political theater and a cover-up of much worse crimes.

While Biden’s crony, Attorney General Garland, has pushed political lawsuits against Texas, for trying to stop illegal aliens released by Biden from spreading COVID, and at Phoenix, for trying to stop homeless squatting, the DOJ has refused to investigate New York’s nursing home deaths. Unlike the rights of illegal aliens and the homeless, the deaths of 15,000 grandmas and grandpas are not a “civil rights issue” to Biden, Garland, and the rest of the Democrat machine.

By resigning, Cuomo and the whole corrupt system he headed evade accountability for the nursing home deaths, for coronavirus coverups, and for the system that protected Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, and every monster with a ready checkbook for Democrats.

Like so many other political offices in New York, Cuomo’s will be filled by a woman. Lt. Governor Kathy Hochul is apparently the only woman in Albany whom Cuomo didn’t get around to groping. New York’s female Democrats are as crooked as their male counterparts, but they are less likely to shove their sweaty hands where they don’t belong. That glass ceiling remains.

Replacing men with women doesn’t clean up New York politics. It just swaps out monsters with poor self-control for monsters with better self-control. And that’s not what New York needs.

What New York Democrats need is a real reckoning. And that’s what Cuomo’s quitting avoids.

Cuomo was a monster, but, like Bill Clinton, his treatment of women was a symptom of a much worse sickness. As civil rights vanished in blue states with rising coronavirus case numbers, he got to play out his worst megalomaniacal fantasies. People died and communities were terrorized. There was no accountability and there still isn’t. And there never will be.

Instead of a real investigation of his crimes, Cuomo goes down as just another in a legion of Democrats, in the state and across the nation, who couldn’t keep their pants on. The parade of young female staffers sitting down for teary interviews may be real victims or they may not be, but the studios are haunted by the thousands of ghosts who truly belong in those chairs.

The nursing home patients who choked out their last breaths courtesy of the Luv Guv couldn’t make it. And none of the heavily made up anchors interviewing the women whom he pawed could spare a minute to talk to the children and grandchildren of the Cuomocides.

But wherever Cuomo goes to live out his decades of disgrace, the ghosts will follow him.

There is a higher justice than the miserable corrupt thing that New York’s political, judicial, and media system can dole out. It can bring down even the greatest of men at the height of their power, turn their icons to dust, and nothing can stand in its way. Not even Andrew Cuomo.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Cuomo, New York, recent

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

The Last 3 Dem Governors of New York Sexually Harassed Women

Daniel Greenfield  March 22, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

For 20 years, Democrat sexual predators have run the state of New York.

For 13 years, the terms of the last three Democrat governors, sexual harassers have held down the office. And for 20 years, Democrat attorney generals who were sexual predators ruled.

It’s quite an achievement for a national and state party that claims to protect women.

"There is a disrespect for women that this administration chronically exemplifies. After the #MeToo movement, they did absolutely nothing when it came to sexual harassment," Governor Cuomo ranted about President Trump during the Kavanaugh nomination.

That was the same year that Cuomo had halted an investigation into Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s mishandling of the Weinstein case back in 2015, six days after Cuomo got a $25,000 check from the law firm that had represented Weinstein in 2015, which had donated $10,000 to Vance.

Vance's office had also asked a judge to reduce Jeffrey Epstein's sex offender status so low that he wouldn't be listed as a sex offender. "Can Cyrus Vance, Jr., Nail Trump?" the New Yorker recently asked. Better ask Harvey Weistein and Jeffrey Epstein about Vance’s track record.

Governor Cuomo has pivoted from condemning President Trump’s “disrespect for women” to accusing his female accusers of secretly working for Trump. The #IStandWithCuomo hashtag is being used to spread claims that Cuomo is being taken down to help President Trump.

If there’s anyone who knows how to really respect women, it’s Cuomo.

But it’s hard to complain about Cuomo sexually harassing and groping women. Let alone be surprised that Cuomo kept up the great tradition of his predecessors.

David Paterson, Cuomo's blind black predecessor, whom he ousted by digging up dirt, revealed at a press conference that he began to have an affair after his wife cheated on him. Paterson admitted to the affair, though denied having a child out of wedlock, to avoid being blackmailed.

"I think we have a marriage like many Americans, maybe even like many of you," Paterson told reporters. Considering he was addressing the media, he was probably right.

After denying that he had affairs with anyone on his staff, he eventually admitted to sleeping with a number of women, including his director of community affairs. He later reached a settlement to head off a sexual harassment lawsuit from his chief of staff whom he had allegedly hired while having an affair with her and then fired after breaking up with her.

Paterson also faced accusations of witness tampering when he called the girlfriend of a top aide after she filed a police report accusing his aide of choking her and throwing her against a mirror.

All of this was a refreshing change from his predecessor, Governor Eliot Spitzer who had picked Patterson as his Lieutenant Governor. Spitzer was forced to resign when he was caught patronizing prostitutes and allegedly used campaign funds to cover the hotel bills.

So the obvious next step was a job at CNN where his show never took off.

In what seems to be a troubling pattern with New York Democrats, one of Spitzer's prostitutes claimed that he liked choking her. The prostitute then claimed that she was pimped out by the Manhattan DA's office a few years before it was trying to keep Epstein off the sex offender list.

Spitzer had started out as the Attorney General of New York back in 1998, Cuomo took over from him in 2006, and Eric Schneiderman succeeded Cuomo in 2010.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was forced to resign after multiple women accused him of choking and assaulting them. One of the accusers said that Schneiderman, a progressive Democrats, kept calling her his, “brown slave”. Another claimed he had declared, “I am the law”.

Sexual predators have held the office of the Attorney General of New York for 20 years from 1998 to Schneiderman’s resignation until 2018. The current officeholder is a woman.

It’s a hell of a record.

Governor Cuomo claimed that the Trump administration “chronically exemplifies” a “disrespect for women”, but it’s New York Democrats who can’t seem to stop preying on women.

All of the New York Democrat abusers were professional feminists.

“A year before Roe v. Wade, I graduated from high school, went to Washington DC, and got a job working in an abortion clinic. I learned an important lesson at a young age. If a woman does not have the right to control her own body, she is not truly equal. She is not truly free,” Schneiderman had tweeted, while he was choking women and telling them they were slaves.

On MSNBC, Eliot Spitzer claimed that he was a feminist with a record of "devout dedication to women’s rights, on the issues of choice", and urged voters to “look at the totality of my record,” and not just the parts that allegedly involved taking away a women’s choice to breathe.

"James says I’m a feminist and she’s right," Cuomo had once boasted at a Planned Parenthood event, referring to the Attorney General now investigating him for sexual harassment. "God told me I was a feminist."

Governor Cuomo had created the Women’s Equality Party as his own platform, and had read a speech attacking President Trump, in which he declared, “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. I am a Jew. I am Black. I am gay. I am a woman seeking to control her body. We are one New York​.”

Cuomo then went on to blame Jews for the pandemic while preventing women from being able to control their bodies with his meaty hands.

All part of the track record of the “national leader in the fight against sexual harassment.”

Democrat sexual predators were able to get away with their deranged behavior because they pretended to be feminists, and feminist leaders, celebrities, and the media were happy to help.

Planned Parenthood alone has provided cover for numerous Democrat sexual predators.

But New York is still something special. If Cuomo is toppled by his own #MeToo moment, that will mean that the last three Democrat governors were forced out of politics due to scandals.

It will also mean that three Democrat AGs were actually career sexual predators.

The media will carefully avoid connecting these dots because they peel back the mask and reveal the true face of their own political movement and the political faction at the top.

The Democrats don’t protect women. Like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, they prey on them.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. 

Thank you for reading.

Tags: Cuomo, Democrats, New York, recent 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

The Last 3 Dem Governors of New York Sexually Harassed Women

Fri Mar 19, 2021 Daniel Greenfield

 

For 20 years, Democrat sexual predators have run the state of New York.  For 13 years, the terms of the last three Democrat governors, sexual harassers have held down the office. And for 20 years, Democrat attorney generals who were sexual predators ruled.  It’s quite an achievement for a national and state party that claims to protect women.

"There is a disrespect for women that this administration chronically exemplifies. After the #MeToo movement, they did absolutely nothing when it came to sexual harassment," Governor Cuomo ranted about President Trump during the Kavanaugh nomination.

That was the same year that Cuomo had halted an investigation into Manhattan DA Cy Vance’s mishandling of the Weinstein case back in 2015, six days after Cuomo got a $25,000 check from the law firm that had represented Weinstein in 2015, which had donated $10,000 to Vance..........To Read More....

Biden and #MeToo Schadenfreude

Editor's Note: These cartoons originally were all about Biden's actions, and go back to his campaign, but given recent events with Cuomo....they still apply. RK

 

If Cuomo Goes Down, So Should Whitmer, Newsom, Murphy, and Wolf

Daniel Greenfield  March 10, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Governor Cuomo of New York is having a bad month, but it’s not because the Democrats and the media finally noticed that his order forcing nursing homes to accept infected coronavirus patients may have killed thousands of senior citizens: it’s because he’s up for reelection in 2022.

With Biden in the White House, the Democrats no longer need a model pandemic governor, and the AOC wing of the party in New York is preparing to primary him with an unfiltered socialist.

That’s why the Cuomo scandal has shifted from the trivial matter of 8,000 to 13,000 dead nursing home residents to the much more serious contention that the Cuomosexual-in-Chief may have once kissed a former aide: a Bernie Sanders supporter named Lindsey Boylan.

Democrats don’t know what to do with thousands of dead nursing home residents, but they’re pretty experienced at monetizing #MeToo scandals.

Some might question whether the purity of Ms. Boylan’s lips, important as they are, should matter more than thousands of dead human beings. But to paraphrase Stalin, an unwanted kiss is a tragedy, but thousands of dead grandmas and grandpas are just another statistic.

And it’s a statistic that has the potential to not only take down Cuomo, but Governor Whitmer in Michigan, Governor Murphy in New Jersey, Governor Newsom in California, and Governor Wolf in Pennsylvania. That’s why, after briefly allowing the public to vent a little outrage at the decision to turn nursing homes into death camps, Dems and the media pivoted to Lindsey’s lips.

While Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, Newsom, and Wolf all ordered nursing homes to take infected patients, only Cuomo, presumably, had made unwanted advances on Lindsey Boylan. And, much more importantly, the Sanders and AOC crowd is only targeting Cuomo, not the others.

There’s every reason to believe that Cuomo is a bully and a creep. But the sudden parade of Cuomo victims is being led by the same radical wing that wants to primary him. Lindsey Boylan

tried to primary Rep. Nadler by claiming he didn’t want to impeach Trump hard enough and is running to be the borough president of Manhattan. It’s a little hypocritical for the wife of an investment banker to be going after the 1 percent, but hypocrisy is the name of the game.

Assemblyman Ron Kim, who claims that Cuomo bullied him so hard that it made his wife cry, is a major supporter of Bernie Sanders and of radicals like the antisemitic Moumita Ahmed. Kim at least has some credibility because he had raised the issue of Cuomo’s infected admission order, but, like most lefties, he focused far more on enabling lawsuits against nursing homes.

That’s more than can be said for Attorney General Letitia James who focused on her plan to run for higher office by waging war on the NRA, only to belatedly pivot to nursing homes in 2021 with a report that raised far more questions than it answered. President Trump’s DOJ had launched an investigation that resulted in Cuomo’s coverup back in the summer of 2020.

Where was James back then? Investigating President Trump.

Now James, whom the media is touting as Cuomo’s likeliest rival, is insisting that only she has the authority to investigate his sexual harassment scandal. James is right that Cuomo shouldn’t be investigating himself, but having his opponent investigate him is just as disgustingly corrupt.

James already showed off her skills when she approved the Weinstein class-action settlement that would have given his victims a $10,000 check and covered Harvey's legal fees.

Cuomo’s abusive behavior was as much of an open secret as Harvey Weinstein’s antics. Both men were protected by the industries of entertainment and politics because they were convenient. It’s hard to believe that anyone in Albany didn’t know about Cuomo’s habits. New York’s political and media class are just using them to distract us from what really matters.

In California, Governor Newsom is facing a recall election, and the state’s skilled nursing facilities have racked up at least 9,000 coronavirus deaths. Newsom’s administration had told skilled nursing facilities that they "shall not refuse to admit or readmit a resident based on their status as a suspected or confirmed COVID-19 case."

Patricia McGinnis, executive director of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, had warned, “California’s directive is nothing less than a death sentence for countless residents."

Democrats want to save Newsom’s job and they don’t want Cuomo’s scandal taking him out.

In Michigan, Governor Whitmer is facing multiple recall efforts and also has an election coming up in 2022. Her administration had cruelly ordered that a “long-term care facility must not prohibit admission or readmission of a resident based on COVID-19 testing requirements or results." There were some 5,600 coronavirus deaths in nursing homes. Michigan Republicans have called for an investigation, but Democrats and their media have loudly opposed it.

The Democrats and their media are not about to undermine Whitmer’s chances in 2022.

And then there’s New Jersey and Pennsylvania. New Jersey copied New York’s order and there have been around 8,000 nursing home coronavirus deaths. Pennsylvania’s Department of Health ordered nursing homes to accept "patients who have had the COVID-19 virus."

Over 12,000 residents of nursing homes died of the virus.

But Biden chose Dr. Rick (Rachel) Levine, who took his own mother out of a nursing home, while forcing homes to accept infected patients, as his very own Assistant Health Secretary.

That’s another reason why the Democrats want to pivot away from nursing home deaths.

The Democrats and their media want to swap out Cuomo, in what they think is a safe seat, with someone more radical who can go all the way with their agenda. While they were willing to allow a little venting over nursing home deaths, they want to change the conversation to #MeToo.

And since Dr. Rick probably didn’t smooch Lindsey, it is a safer scandal for the Democrats.

But thousands of dead nursing home residents deserve better than to be pumped and dumped in a lefty scheme to replace Cuomo with a Bernie Sanders crony. Governor Cuomo deserves to go down for a whole lot more than an unwanted kiss. And he shouldn’t go down alone.

Cuomo’s decision to force nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients was not the isolated action of one politician, but a pattern of behavior by Democrat governors in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and California, who focused on clearing hospitals at all costs, while showing no regard for the most vulnerable people in their states. The governors who issued these orders tended to have ties to the hospital lobby which also led to slower vaccine rollouts.

35,000 to 40,000 nursing home deaths in these four states is not a “scandal”: it’s a crime.

And not just any crime, but the single worst crime by any American elected official.

When 9 people died in Flint, not only did we spend years hearing about the water crisis, but former Governor Rick Snyder, and the former head of Health and Human Services were recently indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Is there any conceivable reason why Cuomo, Whitmer, Newsom, Murphy, and Wolf shouldn’t be facing involuntary manslaughter charges? Apart from Snyder’s party identification and theirs?

How can thousands of entirely foreseeable deaths not result in manslaughter charges?

In their eagerness to replace Cuomo, Democrats have opened a political pandora’s box. It’s time for the conservative movement to start listening to the local Republicans in California, Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania who have pursued investigations of their respective governors, and stop repeating lefty media narratives that won’t put Cuomo behind bars.

Cuomo, Whitmer, Murphy, Newsom, and Wolf should have been charged by the DOJ last year. Since Biden and Garland will never let that happen, that can be the next stage of the fight.

Tens of thousands of grandfathers and grandmothers are dead. The Democrats killed them. The Biden administration is covering it up and protecting the perpetrators from facing justice.

Including its own Assistant Health Secretary.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles.

Thank you for reading.

Tags: California, Coronavirus, Cuomo, Michigan, Murphy, New York, Newsom, Pennsylvania, recent, Whitmer 

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

 

 

False Hero of the Pandemic

The disastrous results of Andrew Cuomo’s nursing-home policy are finally revealed. 

Joel Zinberg February 16, 2021 @ City Journal,  published with permission.  I recommend subscribing, it's free. 

 

Something is rotten in the state of New York. And, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it starts at the top. For the past year, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, with the aid of a credulous and adoring media, has touted his performance in combating Covid-19 and chided other states for their comparative deficiencies. He was rewarded with a lucrative book contract and an Emmy for providing “reliable information” in his news conferences. The cover has finally been blown on a prolonged and concerted effort by Cuomo and his associates to hide his policy mistakes.

Between March 25 and May 10, 2020, an advisory from Cuomo’s Department of Health (DOH) compelled nursing homes to readmit hospitalized Covid-19 patients without checking if they still had active infection. Health experts cautioned that the policy could lead to additional deaths by introducing infected people into closed facilities where those most vulnerable to the disease—the elderly and infirm—live. Cuomo’s responses ranged from the devil—aka the Trump administration—made me do it; to we didn’t force anything—facilities had discretion to turn down admissions; to “nothing to see here”—the policy didn’t increase the number of deaths; to “who cares” where they died.

Cuomo repeatedly and falsely claimed that the policy was directed by federal guidance. A July DOH report (now revised) also claimed that the nursing-home admission policy was following federal guidance that homes “should accept residents with COVID-19.” In fact, the federal guidance was permissive, not proscriptive: “A nursing home can accept a resident diagnosed with COVID-19 . . . as long as the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions” (emphasis added).

The DOH report also claimed the state never “directed that a nursing home must accept a COVID-positive person” (emphasis in original). In fact, the March 25 advisory explicitly said that nursing homes “must comply” with the return of hospital patients. Nursing homes were instructed that they could not deny admission “based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19” (underlining in original) and were “prohibited” from testing prospective admissions for Covid-19.

The DOH report asserted that Covid-19 was already present in nursing-home staff before the new policy and that since the peak of nursing-home admissions from hospitals was one week after the peak of nursing-home fatalities, transmission from staff, not the policy-directed admissions from hospitals, must be the cause of the fatalities. The report seems to discount completely the possibility that adding thousands of infected patients back into the facilities could increase transmission and death. No one claims that the policy-driven admissions caused all the nursing-home deaths, but they very likely unnecessarily increased them.

The report also maintained that the admissions were not problematic because the median length of hospital stay for nursing-home admissions was nine days, and Covid-19 patients are most likely no longer infectious nine days after symptom onset. Yet the claim about how long infectiousness lasts is based on a CDC publication stating that mild-to-moderate Covid cases are not usually infectious beyond ten days post-symptom onset, but severe cases can be infectious up to 20 days. Mild-to-moderate cases do not usually result in hospitalization. Hospitalized patients are far more likely to have had severe symptoms and remain infectious beyond nine days. In addition, a median is the midpoint of a distribution. By definition, half the nursing-home admissions had a hospital stay of less than nine days and were therefore more likely to remain infectious when they were returned to nursing facilities.

Ultimately, no one can say for sure the source of the viruses that killed nursing home residents. It may be, as is often the case, that Cuomo’s coverup was worse than the actual admission policy. Early on, it became apparent that the DOH was understating nursing-facility deaths by only reporting people who had died on-site and not reporting people who had been transferred from facilities to hospitals, where they died. Journalists, academics, and legislators requested accurate counts of admissions and fatalities only to be stonewalled by the Cuomo administration.

The Associated Press made a Freedom of Information Law request in May for the number of admissions during the policy period but got no response. On August 3, the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany-based think tank, filed a FOIL request for the true numbers of nursing-home deaths. The DOH claimed that it couldn’t respond until November. The Empire Center finally sued the DOH to compel it to comply. New York legislators also made multiple inquiries but were rebuffed.

The dam finally broke when the New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a report on January 28 that found the DOH had underreported in-facility deaths by as much as 19 percent, and that when nursing-home residents who died at hospitals were added in, the DOH had undercounted the total number of nursing-facility deaths by 50 percent. The attorney general also concluded that the March 25 directive to admit Covid-19 patients “may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.”

In response, New York State Health Commissioner Howard A. Zucker tried to elide the question of nursing-home undercounting by claiming that the report confirmed DOH numbers on total statewide Covid-19 deaths. He falsely boasted that nursing-facility resident fatalities, both in facilities and hospitals, were still a lower percentage of Covid-19 fatalities in New York than the 35 percent nationwide average.

Six days later, the judge in the Empire Center FOIL request case held that the DOH had violated the Freedom of Information Law and ordered release of the requested nursing-home data. The state’s response showed that about 15,000 nursing-home, assisted-living, and other adult-care facility patients had died of Covid-19—a 63 percent increase in the number of facility deaths from what DOH had previously reported.

This past week, the DOH finally responded to the AP’s May FOIL request, revealing that more than 9,000 Covid-19 patients had been admitted to nursing facilities pursuant to its March 25 directive—43 percent higher than what the state had previously disclosed.

Finally, the most damaging disclosure was a leaked recording from February 10, in which a top Cuomo aide admitted to Democratic lawmakers that the administration hid the true numbers of nursing-home deaths for political reasons. The administration had worried that federal investigators would use these numbers against the governor. A February 11 addendum to the original DOH report now acknowledges that nursing-home deaths account for 35 percent of New York’s Covid-19 deaths.

Yet Cuomo’s policy failures are not confined to nursing homes. His capricious policies on business and restaurant closures, unmoored from public-health data, have destroyed small businesses statewide and wiped out New York City restaurants. The December restaurant reclosure was made at the same time that New York officials released data indicating that during the September–November period in which restaurants were open, restaurants and bars accounted for only 1.43 percent of Covid-19 cases. Transmission in homes and at social events account for nearly 74 percent of cases. And the New York Times noted that the metrics Cuomo had said would guide his decisions on business reopening were worse when he announced New York City restaurants could reopen for indoor dining on February 14 than when he closed them in December. Even New York Democrats are now calling for curbing Cuomo’s emergency powers.

Cuomo has eagerly criticized other state governors’ pandemic responses. “You played politics with this virus and you lost,” he chided. “Look at the numbers.” He had particular censure for Florida governor Ron DeSantis. In fact, New York has the nation’s second-most Covid-19 deaths per million population, just behind New Jersey—and nearly twice as much as Florida. It turns out that it was Cuomo who was playing politics.

Joel Zinberg, M.D., J.D., is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and an Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He was General Counsel and a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019.

Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

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