All Episodes
Previous Next
June 29, 2022 - Adventures in HellwQrld
55:03
Blue Vs Q: A talk with Billy Ferraro

In what will be the first of a (Maybe) on going series of podcasts, Mike talks to William Ferraro of Brookhaven Democrats about activism, elections, and all things political (Note: This was recorded a week ago before everything went nuts in America, well more nuts than normal.) Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everyone, this is Mike Rains, PokerinPolitics, and this is the debut episode of Blue vs. Q. This is where I'm going to be talking about why it's important to vote and be active in politics.
I know Democrats are cringe and awful and bad and all these terrible things, but hey, this is the American political system.
This is the world we're living in.
Today I'm joined by Billy Ferraro, who is a member of the Brookhaven Democrats.
I'm glad that he's here with me.
We're recording this past midnight on Wednesday, so we're both night owls.
So hello, Billy.
Hey, what's going on?
Also known as Will Ferraro in the Brookhaven world, but I'm kind of using my code name here, my nickname.
Anyone who knows me from back in the day, my family, friends, I go by Billy, I go by Will, so if you want to check me out on social media, just Google Will Ferraro, you'll find stuff.
Being a terrible host, I didn't ask exactly how you wanted to be introduced.
No, no, that's totally fine.
I think I told you that already.
I want to complain about me being bad at my job to start.
So, tell us about, like, Brookhaven Dems, how you got involved, what the operation is like.
That's basically the question I would assume, or just giving you the floor to talk about this stuff.
So, I have an interesting background.
As you know, I was once a Republican and that's where I started my political career at.
So late high school, early college, I was more of a liberal person.
But I had views, and this is a time frame of that, that's like 2001, 2002.
So I had views all over the place.
I was a fairly liberal person but I didn't understand why.
When I got to college though, I had some influential economics professors who really made me onto
supply side economics, things like that.
So I really got into being a young Republican and this is like during the Bush years and whatnot.
So I got my first internship with a very influential local state senator who became our Senate Majority Leader.
His name is John Flanagan.
No longer.
He stepped away two years ago.
But he, you know, legendary local politician.
So I worked for him.
I wound up working for the New York State Assembly, lived in our state capitol in Albany as a legislative analyst, then came back down around 2010.
And around that time, I had left the Republican Party just because I was drifting away from them in terms of ideology.
I didn't leave and overnight become a progressive Democrat or anything, but it was a gradual change.
So, you know, I go to public policy school at Stony Brook University, get my public policy degree.
I kind of left politics for a while.
I was kind of disillusioned.
Again, you leave one side, you don't assume the other is going to take you.
And it just gradually changed my mind on a lot of things economically.
And socially, I was never that conservative.
Maybe on a couple things, but never like, I mean, again, I saw the party being the Tea Party.
The party, the Tea Party, that was the thing that turned me off initially.
I was more into being a Reagan Republican and more of an economics focused Republican at that time.
But again, when I start changing my mind on economic policy, specifically as I go to work for the city of New York and work in social services, when you get the real world experience, it really changes you and how you perceive that ideology.
So anyway, that's the background of how I left the party.
After 2016 I decided I needed to get back involved in politics and on the Democratic side because I saw what was happening with Trump and our Congressman Lee Zeldin who I knew when he first ran for Congress and lost in 08 just as like an up-and-comer and then became a state senator.
I have a PhD in Lee Zeldin.
I've known him and known about him for quite a long time before he became this national star.
That leads in how I got involved in local politics, because I wrote an article on Patch.
I kind of became famous locally as the person who would use Patch as his propaganda vehicle, because they'll publish anything.
But if you make it look great and like a legit column, and really lead with a great photo and headline, people will find it.
So if you Google or search on Patch for an article called, uh, A History of Bad Men, Lee Zeldin and His Fanatical Pushers, You'll find the article that got me kick-started in local Democratic politics that was 2017 I published that it kind of went viral locally that and another article about Zeldin and his Not as Bannon fundraiser.
I did one on that too.
It was him and Gorka He had Gorka appear Sebastian Gorka at one of his local events so I did those two and they got shared like thousands of times just locally and So that's how I kind of got involved through that and working in the Democratic primary in 2018 in the 1st Congressional District.
It went after the Dragon of Budapest.
That just makes me laugh.
And that's Lee Zeldin's district.
So anyway, that was how I got kickstarted into that.
Through that, though, one of the pieces of expertise that I tried adding to the local scene in terms of, like, there was just a lot of people in 2018 all over who really wanted to get involved for the first time in Democratic politics.
And I felt what I could give was the knowledge of how the Republican Party built up their local machine, and they truly are a machine in Brookhaven and in Suffolk County.
There's a New York Times article from in the mid-2000s talking about Brookhaven as the last political machine, the last Republican machine in the U.S.
Not quite true, but that's the reputation it had.
Suffolk County was a Republican machine for many years and Brookhaven was looked upon as like the golden throne of that machine.
So I can explain a little bit what that means to be a political machine and why any party locally should aspire to be that and the benefits it has for the races on state and federal levels.
But what I try to impart on Democrats locally is Is the importance of building up through town committees.
So the example, we have 10 towns in Suffolk, Brookhaven being the largest.
Brookhaven is about the size of Miami.
I guess like Miami is a suburban and urban county.
So we're just, we're ginormous.
And the registration numbers between Dem and Republican here, I mean, they were a few years ago, we're only about four points for, Only a four-point advantage for the Republicans.
Now it's only about a one-point advantage.
I mean, we are closing that gap.
But the problem is, we have six council seats, five are controlled by the Republicans.
All three town-wide seats are controlled by the Republicans.
They own this town.
And the one Democrat we do have on the council, I mean, depending on who's listening to this, I could get in trouble for this, but Let's just say that it's very hard to get him on our side on a few different issues.
I'm waiting for this to be controversial, but that's okay.
It's and it's not just him.
Before him, the one Democrat on the council was kind of the same thing.
It's like they use their power to pressure our one Democrat.
It's very difficult to get things done.
And, you know, they were able to get that power by, you know, by building that machine over time and activating their local base and their local registrants.
And what they do is they've used that power to make sure that seats like Congressional District 1, held by Lee Zeldin, is continued to be held by a Republican year after year.
And that's what I try to impart on people, is that if you let, as Democrats often do across the country, if you allow these local seats to be controlled by Republicans, right up from the fire department, fire departments locally, the volunteer ones that we have, Basically all Republicans.
These firehouses are controlled by Republicans.
That's their bench, essentially.
It's where they get their candidates of the future.
We have one former fireman, actually current fire chief, on our Brookhaven Town Council.
All throughout our legislature, fire chiefs.
This is what they do.
They look to their town employees, fire chiefs, ex-cops, detectives, etc.
And that's what they get as their bench.
If you allow the civic associations to be dominated by Republicans, again, those civic associations will use their influence to help local Republicans win office.
If you allow local legislatures, town councils to be controlled by Republicans, guess what?
That is your next congressperson.
That is your next state senator.
That is your next U.S.
senator.
That's possibly your next president.
Right.
Like basically if you allow the, if you like stay clear of an area and allow Republicans to get a foothold and gain power there, the machinery of building power starts.
And that's like when you were talking about the Brookhaven machine and the Suffolk County machine, like that's like going back to the old days of Tammany Hall and that kind of stuff where you actually have people that wield political power that's But not it's just not like a cult of personality like Donald Trump.
It's actually like a system where, like, if the leader gets deposed, or something happens to him, the next guy up takes over and the machine keeps running.
And they keep winning the elections and they keep holding the offices.
And They use the fire departments and all those places as ways to get more candidates, to field them in.
Like, hey, your local honest cop, why shouldn't he be a town councillor?
Why shouldn't he be a state senator?
He's a good man for the job, isn't he?
And everyone kind of agrees with it.
And the next thing you know, he's in.
And they just keep doing that.
And so they just keep perpetuating their influence and perpetuating their control.
Right, and this was something that I started in 2018 locally, but no one else was talking about this.
I felt that our best bet to do the same thing on the Democratic side was control school boards.
So I felt like get on your legislative committees, which no one was doing at the time.
Now, all these legislative committees, these meetings are so popular among activists on the left and right and local officials.
Let me tell you, when I was on that committee for my local district, we rarely had a public official show up.
Maybe it would be the same one every time, our assemblyman.
But now it's popular because they realize, oh, we can get board members, we can get people elected to school boards, you know, doing this.
I think Republicans have completely turned teachers unions against them and school board members can concern parents of school districts.
I think they've completely turned that population against them because of all this critical race theory bullshit that they're, you know, the new red herring.
But I mean, that's an example of how you might fight back against that.
I also encourage Democrats to get on their, you know, their fire.
I helped a, you know, a Democrat that we do have in the local fire district, who's a chief.
We helped her win re-election because a local extremist group, basically, this is Talkin' Patriots, were going after her because she's the longtime girlfriend of our local assembly person, who they're also going after with some QAnon idiot.
And that's this year.
So it's like, it's never... Do you happen to know the name of that QAnon idiot?
I'd love to find out who it is.
I shouldn't, you know, I shouldn't say QAnon, but it wouldn't surprise me, but he is all on the conspiracy theories.
His name is Tom Weirman or Weirman.
It's W-I-E-R-M-A-N-N.
He's primarying the Republican choice for assembly.
So that's going to be interesting.
It is a blue district, but you never know this year.
Oh yeah.
Oh, I mean, you, you have, I mean, There's a race to just be the craziest person in these fields.
And one of the things I talked about in the regular weekly podcast was there's a guy, Jim Marchand, in Nevada
who literally said that everyone in Nevada who's been elected over the past decade or so
was put there by George Soros in the deep state.
And that basically, if a Democrat wins an election when he's Secretary of State of Nevada, he won't certify it.
He just will refuse to acknowledge that they won.
I mean, when I started publishing my patch articles, I'd get comments under them, people alleging
that I'm paid by George Soros.
And I would reply and say, I fucking wish.
Tell him to cut me a check!
George Soros, if you were listening, cut me a check and I will do your bidding.
Oh, that reminds me, oh my god, there's this unbelievably awesome, and by that I mean terrible, video series called Fall Cabal by a crazy Dutch lady.
And in one of the videos, they have these Antifa protesters, and she takes it like them being serious.
Because they're being filmed, so they start sarcastically chanting, Soros, Soros, where's our money?
And she's saying, these Antifa protesters have not been paid, and they're lashing out at their paymaster, George Soros.
It's like, no, it's a joke.
Because that's what you people say about everyone who's a part of the left is that they're funded by Soros.
And it took like 2000 mules.
don't know if you've had much dealings with that movie, but that movie, which is an absolute dogshit. I've been I've
been on Twitter talking about it for forever now. But it takes over
an hour, but they finally do bring they do name drop George Soros finally in that film because he's always got to be
there. He's always got to be the bad guy. Meanwhile, you've got
Peter Thiel trying to buy Senate seats in Iowa in Ohio and in
Arizona and...
And you have the Koch brothers, the Mercers, you have so many Republican sugar daddies out there trying to buy influence in Congress.
But, oh that left, oh George Soros, gotta be looking out for what he's doing to America.
I wish that there was a way to demonize right-wing sugar daddies the way Soros gets demonized, because it's just, it's hilarious.
It's such projection on their part to complain about these things.
You know where I learned of 2,000 mules from?
So I watch on YouTube the Michael Franzese Show or whatever. He's a former mob
Captain or what have you and it's basically mob shoot interviews basically pro wrestling does shoot YouTube
interviews and The gangster rap world the mafia world and the bodybuilding
world now do their versions of shoot interviews like this is the funniest thing ever
So I was all into the show because it's all mafia stories from a guy who really did it
But of course, he ran out of stories and realized, you know what?
A lot of my listeners are right-wing people.
Let me just go to interviewing fucking schmucks like Giuliani, who's anti-mafia.
I mean, he killed the mob.
Like, why are you interviewing him?
And what's-his-face who did 2000 Mules?
So I'm like, all right, maybe I'll just watch this less.
But yeah.
I want to go back to what you said about the impact of local politics on what goes on nationally.
There's no better example of that than redistricting.
It's not enough to win the House of Reps and think that we can ignore local seats and then say,
well, as long as we win in 2010, 2020, 2030, we'll control at that 10-year mark redistricting.
Not so, because, okay, you have a majority delegation in one particular state,
and they come up with a map, and you'll have the governorship, and they'll come up with a map,
but guess what? The state legislature that you ignored, which is still Republican,
will veto the map, and the courts, which you also ignored those elections and or the local
legislative elections that produce the people who appoint those judges, have struck down your maps.
Hell, New York State, we actually have a super majority controlled Assembly and Senate, and we still got one Republican guy drawing our maps.
How did that happen?
Well, partly Andrew Cuomo's fault, because there's a civil war going on right now between Democrats.
Or Cuomo, Democrats, our former governor, and basically everyone else.
So Cuomo-appointed judges sided with Republicans on their lawsuit against the redistricting map, which would have given Democrats like a 20-3 or 23-3 advantage, like something crazy.
And vetoed that.
The lawsuit was challenged in a specific county because they knew a specific Republican judge was there.
So that judge, a Republican judge, got to appoint one map master to create all the maps himself.
So we went through the trouble of getting supermajority Dems in the Senate and Assembly here.
The redistricting maps basically came down to one guy appointed by a Republican judge.
And they're okay maps, but they are nothing like what we would have and should have had.
So that's local politics.
Right.
You have to, that's the thing.
You have to contest every election.
You have to do everything you can to try to get every crumb of power you can, because as you just said, literally one Republican appointed judge in one district was able to do this amount of damage To what was, I mean, let's call a spade a spade here, going to be an aggressive Democrat gerrymander, which is something we have to do in politics these days.
Because I know Florida, I was reading like a bunch of Republican shitheads were like, Oh, the Florida redistrict is so good.
We're going to win the house back because DeSantis like just fucking ruined it for the Democrats.
And it's awesome.
And.
That's the kind of shit that people don't really, like, notice or pay attention to when it's like, well, if we had been able to, like, win a seat, win a house of the Florida legislature, you could have had a chance of stopping that.
If we could have won the governorship of Florida in that wave election where everyone thought, no one thought the state was going to win that election.
And now.
Yeah.
I'm having people tell me that DeSantis is my next president.
And it's like, do you remember what was actually happening in 2018?
That was when he was supposed to lose.
I mean, he was down in the polls all the whole way.
Oh, it's Florida.
He comes back and he wins.
And now he's Trump Jr.
He's the rising star of the Republican Party.
It's amazing.
And it's just that kind of thing where when you win governorships, you have all that power, but also you take away the bench of the other team.
If DeSantis wasn't the governor of Florida, Like who would be their rising star if Trump were to keel over tomorrow or to actually get convicted of a crime and not be allowed to run anymore?
Like they'd have to trot out Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or a guy that Trump dunked on aggressively in the last, in 2016.
So it's like, it's so important to win races, not just for the sake of That it's good and you wield power, it actually blunts the other side's ability to promote people.
Like what you said about running that cop, and then he becomes a state senator, and then he becomes a member of Congress, now he's a senator.
Now he's a president.
And it's like, at any point in time, you could have stopped that local cop if you'd run a good candidate against him.
But, oh, who cares about that state Senate seat?
Oh, who cares about that congressional seat?
Oh, who cares about him being the governor or whatever?
And it's like, no, it matters.
You've got to have pushback the whole way, because you never know who's going to be The big deal.
I remember in 2004, some Republican, after W1 re-election, they were just like, well, we just kicked the Democrats' asses and we dominated them and all the Democrats got out of 2004 was this guy named Barack Obama.
Sucks to suck for them!
And it's like...
Well, right, I mean, that just goes to show, and first of all, anyone who's been involved in politics locally, nationally, what have you, for any extended amount of time knows that there's no such thing as putting the other party out of business.
No matter what kind of super majorities, majorities you build up, Obama's a great example because You know, before it looked like the Republicans were just gonna, you know, control everything for a long time.
Two years later, they lose the House and the Senate.
And then two years after that, there's a super majority in Barack Hussein Obama, the, you know, the person that thought could never be elected and was dangerous.
Progressive, liberal, is now the president, and it really looked like, from the perspective of Democrats at the time, that, oh, we're going to control shit from now on.
Two years later, Republicans have a record-breaking wave election, like 55 seats or something crazy like that swung.
And they're thinking, well, we're definitely beating Obama in two years.
Well, no, you still lose to Obama.
But then in 2014, they get the Senate back.
And then 2016 happens, you think Hillary's a shoo-in.
Well, no, sorry, Donald Trump is winning.
Two years later and thereafter, Trump consistently, every year, locally and in the midterms, and then in his reelection campaign, Republicans consistently lost all over the board when Trump was at the top of the ballot or was the person that was the topic of the election, which he always was.
So, and then you look at last year's local elections, uh, at least, I mean, it varied state to state, but I can tell you in our County, it was a fucking disaster, a fucking disaster for Democrats.
So Democrats have the tendency, I think, to get down on themselves about these things and Republicans seem to roll along.
Uh, but I want to let Democrats know, especially people who are newer to politics, like one, two, three years in.
That nothing is permanent.
Everything can be reversed.
Every loss can be reversed, and so can every win, which is why you have to stay involved.
Oh, yeah.
One of my favorite things is to talk about, I can never remember his name.
His name is O'Connell, I believe.
But one of JFK's, one of his assistants, he wrote a book and the title of the book is No Final Victories.
And that's the nature of politics.
There's never going to be a moment where the other side is totally vanquished and that you've achieved all your goals and you have no more goals to achieve.
Like, no matter where you got America to at a moment where like, imagine you had like a list of like 15 things you wanted enacted and over the course of like 30 years, you achieved it.
You got all 15 things done.
Guess what?
When that was over, you're probably going to come up with 15 more things.
It never stops.
Like the process just continues on and on and on.
And I think that's something that's incredibly frustrating to a lot of people is understanding that politics is a grind.
It's not this, I mean, you want this instant gratification, you want the big payoff, you want something to happen, but That's never how it works out.
I mean, it's always going to be this sort of thing where the other side is going to throw as much sand in the gears as they can to try to stop you from getting what you want.
You're going to have to fight with your own caucus and do all these things.
Everyone was like, well, Trump's going to come in.
He's going to repair Obamacare.
He's going to do, he's going to build the wall.
He's going to do all this stuff.
And really all Trump did legislatively in his time of office was get that massive tax cut through and any Republican can pass a tax cut.
I mean, that's the fucking easiest bit of legislation in the history of the world.
Who doesn't like cutting taxes?
Even Democrats can pass a tax cut.
Everyone can.
Right, exactly.
It's the easiest thing in the world.
Just, hey, we're cutting everyone's taxes, and it's like, oh cool, done.
I mean, so ridiculous.
One of the problems is that, and this is why I think we're in this age of fleeting majorities, which if you look at the history of the US political history, at least from the 20th century on, Yes, we do have this period of stability that people who are, you know, both boomers and older millennials like us or Gen X folks experienced from like the 1950s to the 1990s where majorities didn't flip often.
In fact, they probably only flipped a couple of times in that period.
Presidents often got reelected, but if you go back prior to that and you look from like the 1910s to 1940s, really up until like actually the late 1930s when FDR gets in, and even then they were in the early 50s, like a lot of back and forth, there was constant turmoil, political turmoil, constant overturning of majorities.
So, like, this is not unprecedented and, in fact, it's more the norm than not.
So, really, what we're doing is just entering back into what this country was always used to anyway prior to World War II.
But I think one of the reasons why now, in the age of cable news and the internet and people being in their silos, is that opposition messaging is literally the easiest thing to do in the world.
Especially, like, you go back to that Obama time when we had super majorities in the Senate and a Democratic president.
I mean, all you have to do is blame everything bad or manufacture bad things on the people in power.
It is the easiest thing in the world to do, to use outrage politics on the left and the right.
When Trump was in power, he was a gift to the Democratic Party.
I'm going to say it right now.
Not so much from the perspective of the Supreme Court nominations, and that's really why I think 2016, like, There was no beating Trump.
We didn't beat Trump in 2020.
We had one chance to defeat Trumpism, and that was 2016.
Once he won that, Trumpism became permanent.
So we forever lost to him, despite whatever victories we had in the interim, because what he was looking to achieve was achieved.
They got a Supreme Court completely rigged in their favor, and Trumpism will outlast his short term.
He was a terrible politician, but he inspired a movement that was ready to be inspired, quite frankly.
And now it's there to stay until they are permanently put out or the Republicans being put in such dire straits that they have no choice but to rebuild from the ground up without minding that they lose a big chunk of their base.
But quite frankly, they're not at that point yet.
When they lose, they just lose by just enough to, you know, come back with the same old shit.
Right.
They figure they'll get them next time because it was close and they're We need to bottom out and rebuild.
That's really what they need to do, which is kind of what they did in 08, where they're like, all right, let's rebuild from this, like, George Bush, Ronald Reagan party.
And they had an opportunity to rebuild and rebrand as the party of the nutjobs.
And what we need to do is beat the nutjobs so bad that the more reasonable Republicans, you know, back when they just wanted to bankrupt government.
Remember those days?
Those folks then, You know, they can maybe have a chance to go, okay, now we can step away from the Trump shit.
Now we're not worried about primaries.
Now, you know what?
Let's rebrand.
Yeah, the Grover Northquist and drowning government in the bathtub.
Yeah, those heady days.
Those liberal Republicans.
Yeah, well, one other little trivia thing I was going to bring up was that Clinton, W, and Obama, that was the first time in American history that we had three presidents serve eight years in a row since Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
So that was a massive anomaly that we just had eight years back to back to back for three presidents.
Because in American history, a lot of our presidents just died in office or didn't win reelection.
And that's just kind of the way it always was.
And then suddenly we had this Weird amount of stability from 1992 until 2016.
1992 until 2016. And then Trump broke the cycle by being the first one-termer since
Pappy Bush. And the other thing I was going to bring up, as I mentioned, was that what
you said, it's like if Hillary had beaten Trump and she had like beat him decisively,
that might have been able to break the fever dream of the Republican Party because it took
a lot for the Democrats to go from what they were under JFK and Lyndon Johnson to what
Bill Clinton was.
But that was because Republicans controlled the White House for 20 of 24 years before Clinton won.
You had Jimmy Carter's four year term in there, but that was it.
And he got swept away by Reagan.
And then it was 12 more years of Republican rule after that.
So in a way, like Washington had become hardwired to accept that a Republican was supposed to be president because that was the way it was for basically two decades.
And it looked like that was what was going to happen.
And then it didn't.
And now Republicans are like, Oh, we don't have to rebrand.
We don't have to fix things.
We can just trot out Trump in 2024 and He lost.
I mean, you would think that the party would think to themselves, our guy lost by 8 million votes.
This is a bad thing overall.
But they're looking at it from the point of view of a couple of votes in Pennsylvania, a couple of votes in Wisconsin, a couple of votes in Arizona.
Boom!
We get back in.
We got this.
And like, they're not seeing this as a problem.
They're not seeing this as like, as a thing that we need to fix this about ourselves.
We're fine. We're good.
We can win a rematch between Trump and Biden.
It's a good, it's okay.
We don't have to chart a new direction.
We don't have to change anything.
And that's, it's really unfortunate that, that the insane party remains the insane party and sees no reason to stop being the insane party.
Right, and you know, comparing the Republican years of Reagan, not just Reagan's actual term, but they were the party of Reagan for another couple decades after that.
I mean, every Republican primary was shaped by who's going to grab the mantle from Reagan.
I mean, from 2008, 2012, 1996, like every debate was, well, you know, who's more like Reagan?
Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.
Now it's good.
You're going to see that with Trump.
Well, you know, I'm a Trump.
I was not a never Trump.
Trump will now dominate their primaries and who can be the closest to Trump without being like unreliable like Trump.
But the difference, I think, in why Reagan was so much more successful for incumbent Republicans versus Trump, which has produced this outrage machine that will be good for getting Democrats out of office, but not keeping it for very long.
And this is, again, also a problem for Democrats, too.
Is that one side figured out opposition messaging very well in grievance politics, but the beauty of what Reagan was able to accomplish for his side was that they figured out how to deliver in such a way that they can run on what they delivered.
Not just like, oh man, I really did dig up some achievements of mine and sell people on why it was big.
They hardwired the American voter to accept that.
I will judge my incumbents based on where my tax dollars are going.
And they were able to give tax cuts and run on tax cuts and crime rates all over.
Oh, crime is down?
Tax cuts are achieved?
We get a re-election.
And they were able to run on that boilerplate of, we don't need a candidate with the charisma of Reagan.
We just need someone to fit the image and then run on that Reagan formula of tax cuts, Crime and, you know, sunny days in America, and it was successful for incumbents.
It is so hard to figure out a formula for either party to run on achievements in such a way that people vote because they're afraid of what they're gonna lose if they don't reelect their side.
This is what Biden needs to figure out, and I think this is, if I'm being critical here, the failure so far And it's not all him.
I mean, let's be realistic.
We have senators in Arizona and in West Virginia who are single-handedly stopping progress.
It really has become the Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema show.
And that's unfortunate.
Let's be honest.
Democrats need 52 Senate seats to have 50.
That's the way it is right now.
And, you know, if Maine Democrats had been successful kicking out Susan Collins, we wouldn't have this problem right now.
Oh, if the guy from North Carolina could have kept his dick in his pants, we had to have one.
I mean, Georgia, look at Georgia for how to be, you know, successful in building your party because they, you know, they seem to be the only local party that can, like, withstand rough years or overperform.
In other years, but I'll say though, I think for Democrats, like you could use Obama as an example, and actually 2018 would be a great example, even though Obama was out of office.
One of the big reasons why Dems were successful in 2018 was because every Republican was running on taking away ACA, Obamacare.
And it proved to be the number one polling issue for Democrats, because even in red states and swing districts, Um, where it was no longer being called Obamacare and being called ACA, like people understood, okay, even Republican voters, like, oh, I rely on this.
Like, I can't have this taken away.
It wasn't a problem in 2010 because Republicans could run against Obamacare, but it hadn't been instituted yet until 2014.
So they could go out there and say, this is some socialist program that's going to bankrupt the country.
Totally different eight years later when it's been instituted and people are surviving off this.
Oh, yeah, that's always the fear they have about these programs is that once the public gets something, they're not going to give it back.
And that's why it's so important to get the program in and make it work and make it successful so that people see the benefit of it.
Two problems Biden has right now is that The one thing he was able to accomplish, which is infrastructure spending largely in many states, if not most,
That money has not been spent yet.
And there is the question over, you know, how much of it actually goes to its purpose.
I mean, that's any big spending bill.
You kind of build that in into the equation that a lot of that money will be lost.
I hate to say that, but you that's not an error.
That's a feature of the system.
It's just how much like COVID spending.
I think a lot of the the money that was supposed to go to small businesses way too much of it was wasted and went and went towards things that it shouldn't have.
In terms of like fraudulent people, that's a problem.
You know, and that's something we can actually be critical of.
And that's not a criticism of Biden.
I mean, that was going on under Trump as well.
But the other problem Biden has is that he didn't, he should have been using his executive order to whatever extent possible, my opinion on student loans, to do something tangible for people that if it were to be taken away, they could realistically envision how it would hurt them.
So I think there are millions of Americans who could benefit from complete cancellation of their loans.
That would change their lives because these are millennials, people with homes, families now, kids.
I'm one of them.
And that's something that would change their lives.
And if those voters were to see Republicans campaigning on, you know, no, we have to undo that.
No, we have to stop that.
Now you have something where you can say, look, we were elected as Democrats and we changed your lives.
Even if it angers other voters, you need a large block of people to be able to say, my life changed for the better.
It's not enough to say that voting Democrats, Is a safety gauge against Republicans.
It is, and that is a good reason to vote, but it's not something that's going to save a majority.
So I think what Biden has to figure out is accomplish something, not micro accomplishments, but accomplish something large enough to where we local Dems could go around saying, look, this is our brand.
It's hard for us to campaign on local accomplishments when you're ultimately going to be judged on the branding of Biden and the fact that in every gas station we see the fucking sticker.
I did that with, you know, we see that around here.
We need to have our own stickers where it's like, you know, basically like, sorry, the president doesn't control gas prices, but there has to be something done.
Like I think Biden desperately needs to have a bill cracking down on, um, These gas companies that are price gouging.
That's a huge thing right now.
Go on about, there's graphics that can be shared and information shared on how the price per barrel of oil is no different now than it was, I don't know if it was 2013, 2014, but the price is twice as much as it was at the pump now as it was then.
There are countless examples To how price gouging is a big problem right now with gas prices.
And that argument is just not being made.
There's a populist argument.
There's a way for us to be populist while in power against other powerful folks like gas companies.
That we're just not doing it.
And I don't know why.
Well, that is kind of like the high end, like the party level sort of discussion about where we are in America right now and all that good stuff.
But we're going to have to answer for that locally in these local elections.
That is something that, you know, voters don't know the difference between what happens locally and nationally often in these midterm elections.
So our you know our state assembly people and the next year our local Politicians our local Dems like they're gonna have to answer about gas prices.
Oh Absolutely, but what I was gonna say is so like that is That level unlike what I would say on like the personal level on the local level like if someone is decided that they were going to get into becoming politically engaged and politically active.
What would you say would be the most productive use of their time and energy?
What should they be trying to do to like kind of establish themselves as someone who wants to try to make a difference, effecting change in politics?
The number one thing, make sure that you're voting every year.
And I know that we're assuming that people are doing that, but there are people who consider themselves active who might vote even in every midterm who actually are not voting in their local elections.
So that's the first thing.
Get to be an active voter.
The second thing you should do, I know a lot of people would say join your local Democratic committee, and you definitely should.
That might be the next step, but I would say find something.
You can't just force people to do things they're not interested in.
I wish everyone was interested in town politics the way I am, but being realistic, I think what people really need to do is just find something that's interesting about what's going on.
Some form of volunteering.
That would interest you, even if it's just getting involved in your civic, if you like that.
If you'd rather be involved with activist groups and the actual party committee, that's okay.
I wish you'd do both, but if we can only have you doing one as opposed to nothing, I'll take you doing the one.
But any kind of action or activity that leads to you helping spread the word about our party and our candidates or our issues in any way, shape or form, do that.
But there has to be something actionable.
I would say like, don't just go to protests and stand there and hold signs.
I mean, I'm notoriously kind of like down on the concept of protesting because I feel like too many times we don't then take that energy and do it and apply it.
In other ways.
But even if you're going to do that, that's great.
I mean, I've done the protest thing myself, but I'm not good at it.
That's not my thing, right?
It's not my forte.
But at the very least, get involved with candidates you like.
If you don't like any of the candidates, get involved in groups that have influence over who candidates are, that being your committee.
Go to your local town or county and ask how you can get involved with the party committee.
Google whatever your town is.
Your county, your city, whatever your district is referred to.
Google the local Democratic Party.
Check it out.
Check out the email.
Maybe you've emailed them and they haven't gotten back to you.
That happens.
There's a lot of fucking old people who are involved in this shit who are really bad at social media.
If you can't do that, look up what the local campaigns are for legislature or aldermen or whatever, city council.
Local legislature campaigns.
Get involved in whatever the local campaigns are.
Who's running for Congress?
Just Google it.
Google your district.
If you don't know what your district is, look it up or call your Board of Elections and ask.
Give them your address and say, what is my congressional district?
Then Google who's running my election district, my congressional district, and contact their campaign.
Someone will get back to you.
Get involved and learn through that who the local players are, who your local committee person is.
I can give the example of Brookhaven, basically to be a committee member, you would show interest, say that you want to be a committee member, you would be assigned what's called an election district, which is just a single voting precinct.
And you would collect petitions for yourself from local registered Democrats.
It's like 5% here.
It's about 5% of the total number of registered Democrats or whatever that number is.
You just need 5% of those registered Democrats assigned for you.
It usually comes out to be like in our local area, like, you know, anywhere from 10 to 15 signatures.
And then you're in.
You're a local committee person.
Now you get to vote on party leadership.
I always say when people locally complain about our party leadership, and I have my complaints too, I think we're way too fucking old, and we're way too not with the times, and I'll say that about my own committee, and we're trying to change that, but I'm going to be our next district leader.
I picked our last district leader.
You know, I run a local club.
I have skin in the game.
I ran for town supervisor in a town of millions of people where we have almost a million registered voters alone.
I ran and carried the banner and I had a record number of local volunteers and I broke the record for small individual donations against a behemoth of a candidate who's been around for like decades.
So I did my part to try to inspire folks, even though I lost that election.
That wasn't the point.
I knew I'd lose, but I did it so I can inspire people, build up an email list, get volunteers, and then put that back into the local committee.
I did that.
We need more people doing things like that.
We need folks being involved on multiple levels of politics.
You don't have to overwhelm yourself or do too much.
Start with something simple.
If all you can do is once per year, Spend a day knocking doors or making phone calls for your local candidate, then do that.
Because we have hundreds of people who like to follow our pages on Facebook and do other things that out of them, like out of those hundreds, a large percentage are not doing anything.
So if you could do like one day worth of work or one week worth of work every year and everyone was doing that, it would have enormous positive consequences for our party.
Yep, and of course voting.
That was the number one thing, yeah.
My philosophy in organizing locally is that, you know, especially for like our third, what's called our Third District Dems, so like, you know, my sphere of influence is what I've named Central Brookhaven, so it's like out of our six council districts, it's our third district, then pieces of the first, pieces of the second, pieces of the fourth.
But my motto is we are looking to make inactive voters active voters.
Well, we are looking to make unregistered voters registered Democrats.
We are looking to make registered inactive voters to be active.
We are looking to make active voters volunteers, and we're looking to make volunteers candidates and leaders.
And that is the stepping stone.
And that is literally the process you take.
I'm trying to make sure that in my local party, we have as many people screening for local office as possible so that we have a wide selection of candidates.
I want us to be more diverse.
I want us to have more women involved.
60% of our local registered voters in Brookhaven, I'm sorry, registered Democrats, actually over 60% are women.
We don't have enough people of color involved, to be honest.
I want, especially if there's not the pressures of I think any type of candidate can be electable, but you always have to deal with these older white Democrats telling you that, oh, you know, this person is not electable.
They happen to be a woman or a person of color.
And that's frustrating.
But you know what?
There are other seats where some of us get our pick of who gets to run.
We don't have to hear that bullshit.
And anytime I have it, like I can say, I pretty much decide who the candidate is in our third district.
You know, in 2019, I chose as my running mate in this district a woman named Talat Hamdani, who was the first Muslim American to run for town office.
And, you know, while she lost because it's a heavy red district, she actually, and we have the numbers to back this up, she increased Muslim turnout by over 20%.
And that's a big deal because we have a very big and growing Muslim community here.
I'm helping out a Senate candidate.
Who is also a young Pakistani-American, and he's inspiring people to get involved too.
Recruit candidates for office.
Find something.
Especially if you have your pick, you don't have to deal with these bullshit arguments about who should run, who shouldn't run.
Pick folks who are different.
Pick folks who will inspire one segment.
of the local population more than others.
Pick someone who can energize some segment, any segment of the voting population that was previously inactive.
So you got to be strategic.
Don't just run people who try out there and lose.
You don't care who they are.
You don't care what effort level they have.
Pick people who will give effort.
Pick people who will inspire new segments of voters.
And in the uncompetitive seats and in the competitive seats, we need to, you know, we need to be better about having more women run.
We need to be better about more people of color running to show that we are a party of inclusivity.
And I question whether or not we do that on a regular enough basis, at least in the suburban districts.
I think there's still this argument in suburban democratic parties over like, are we the party of like, White men and white women.
Are we the party of conservative Democrats?
I hate that whole argument because I think there's room for everybody.
I don't like this whole progressives versus liberal Democrats thing.
Why can't we run progressives in competitive seats?
And why can't we have a Democrat who's a little bit more conservative?
I feel like if they're credible in that they put in the work in their community, whether they're more to the left or to the center, and if they're hardworking as a candidate, then they should be a candidate.
That's my philosophy.
Yeah, so that was really kind of what I was really looking for.
That was kind of the thing where just listening to you, I was like, now I want to run through a brick wall.
I want to knock on some doors.
I want to talk to some people.
I want to be more active.
I just don't want to be a podcasting schmuck that bitches and moans about QAnon all day.
I came out here to convert you, Mike.
Oh, yes.
And converted I have been.
So I'm going to wrap this up.
So I just wanted to say, lastly, of course, how do you feel about the Rangers going into next year?
Because, I mean, Tampa Bay is fucking Tampa Bay, those goddamn pieces of shit.
Everyone that I was listening to was saying, Oh, the Rangers are a year ahead of schedule and all that happy, happy horse hockey.
Um, but like, was this year gravy or was it agonizing that it didn't, it didn't work out properly?
I mean both because it was gravy and then instead of just getting like RIS' kicked in the third round we actually had a 2-0 series lead so it's like I'd rather have just like got RIS' kicked than never had hope going in and similar to when we went to the finals in 2014 against the Kings going into the finals and was like whatever happy to be here But then it's like, oh, we blew leads in three out of four games?
Oh shit, third period leads?
Oh my god, like, we could have actually won.
And I truly feel, even though they lost tonight, Tampa did, I truly feel like the winner of the Eastern Conference was going to beat Colorado simply on goaltending.
Um, Igor Shostakhin, in my opinion, he's the best goalie in the world.
He is, and us Ranger fans who've been following him since he was in the KHL, let me tell you, he is god tier every level that he's played at.
And there was no question he'd be God-tier when he came to the NHL.
Among us, hardcore fans, everyone who says, oh, he's a shock, he came out of nowhere.
No, the fuck he did not.
We knew he was gonna do this.
You all are just finding out now.
So, he is great.
He's gonna continue to be great.
He just put together a season that rivals some of Dominic Kosciuk's best seasons, statistically.
So, I think with him and Ned against Colorado, if that other goalie is letting up three to four goals a game, you're done.
Uh, Tampa Bay's defense just shut us down.
I didn't even think Vasilevsky was particularly impressive, but that defense just did not allow quality shots 5-on-5 on that net.
They simply didn't.
How do I feel about that?
Yeah, Vasilevsky had a shit first period tonight.
That's why they were down 3-1.
Yeah, he rebounded well after that, but again, if he just let up, like, one less goal, like, they would have won.
But I do think they'll bounce back and win.
If not, then whatever.
But how do I feel about the Rangers?
I feel great.
I think that we were, for a long time now, a few years, expected to turn into one of the best teams in the league.
And I think the bottom line for the Rangers is we have the guy who's going to win the Vezina Trophy as best goaltender.
We have reigning Norris Trophy winner and, in my opinion, a guy who will consistently be one of the top three defensemen in the league every year in Adam Fox.
We have a guy in Mika Zvanijad who's arguably a top 10 to top 15 center in the league.
We have a 50 goal scoring wing in Kreider.
We have young guys like Kakko and Lafreniere and Hedel who are rising stars.
And we also have one of the top five offensive players in the game total.
And you could double check that with the stats the last three years.
He's up there.
I think he's one of the top three to five points per game players in Artemi Panarin.
So we have elite pieces, which is what the team was missing in prior successful years, where we had a lot of grinders and the best goalie in the league, but that's all we had.
Now we have the best goalie and we have superstars.
And I think we have good depth, it's just a matter of being wise with the cap.
And making sure to keep that depth around.
We have a question over who's going to be the number two center next year.
If we can solve that issue and not have a liability as our number two center, I think next year we'll be competitive again and we'll be right back in the final four.
Yeah.
So optimism about political activism and the Rangers.
So all that in a bag of chips.
More so about the Rangers.
Yeah.
The midterms, questionable.
The Rangers, not questionable.
So, thanks, Billy, for spending time here.
Hopefully, I'll be able to do this every week with someone talking about the midterms, talking about politics in general, talking about political activism.
▲
Export Selection