Conspirituality - Brief: The Man Who Lives With 16 Cats

Oct. 25, 2025 - Conspirituality

34:19

Brief: The Man Who Lives With 16 Cats

Social media has been filled with clips of Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee for mayor of NYC. He's been proving quite the foil for Andrew Cuomo's attempt to upset Zohran Mamdani. But who is this man, exactly? Derek and Julian discuss. Show Notes 16 Cats, 320 Square Feet and One Long-Shot Candidate for Mayor 7 Takeaways From the Final N.Y.C. Mayoral Debate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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	Everybody agrees Curtis Sleewa won that debate tonight.
	I actually agree with Curtis on that at any point.
	Please agree, by the way.
	Now it's time, Andrew Cuomo.
	You're one and done.
	You lost the primary.
	You lost the debate to me.
	Make room for Jordan Mondami versus Curtis Sleewa.
	The next debate.
	Let the people pick the winner.
	And you know after tonight, it's gonna be me.
	No, no, Curtis, it is definitely not going to be you.
	But that video is pretty funny, which is kind of why I wanted to do this episode today overall.
	Sliwa is very problematic in a number of ways.
	So as a heads up, this is definitely no kind of endorsement.
	And I believe he's playing a big role in why Zoharan Mamdani is going to win the New York City mayoral race in a couple of weeks.
	But it's Sliera's response as the Republican nominee in that race that piqued my interest in covering this because it goes against so much of what we've seen coming from the right in the Trump era.
	The clips you just heard came after the first debate between Sliwa, Mamdani, and Andrew Cuomo, and Sliwa has been on a media blitz ever since that night.
	Plus, like I said, he's fucking funny.
	But there's also some context for that, which we're going to get into.
	And I think those clips are making people be like, who the fuck is this guy?
	So let's get into it.
	I'm Derek Barris.
	I'm Julian Walker.
	You're listening to a Conspirituality Brief, The Man Who Lives with 16 Cats.
	And as always, you can find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod individually on Blue Sky.
	And if you are able to do so to support us as independent media creators, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/slash conspiratuality, where you will get access to all of our bonus episodes, as well as listen to every episode ad-free.
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	Okay, let's cut to the chase here.
	Curtis Sliwa has said some racist shit in his life.
	He said some anti-Semitic shit.
	He's said some misogynistic shit.
	He said some racist shit while seeming to prop up Orthodox Jews, then turned around and said some nasty shit about Orthodox Jews.
	A lot of people are unearthing old clips trying to create gotcha moments on Sliwa.
	But if you're from the tri-state area, you know all this shit already.
	It's all gotcha moments.
	He only does gotcha moments.
	Exactly.
	It's kind of like Donald Trump.
	Most people from where I'm from always know who that guy is.
	And like Trump, Sliwa is a born and bred New Yorker, eight years younger than the current dictator in charge.
	Okay, Derek, hold up here.
	I'm just noticing something and I have to ask, is it the Jersey boy in you that gets so foul-mouthed when you think about this kind of New Yorker?
	It's absolutely unavoidable.
	I don't think people, I've worked in media for a long time and I really do try to present well.
	But when I'm talking to people who I grew up with, fuck is the word that is used every third word.
	It's just, it is what it is.
	When I see Sliwa, it's the only way I can talk because it's just the tri-state code switching, which just results in us having, if you've ever watched The Sopranos, that is where I come from.
	Yeah, okay.
	Yeah, that video is amazing.
	Like the way that he cuts together, I agree.
	I agree with Curtis.
	But then like his whole demeanor, like I haven't watched a lot of stuff from him in the past and he just comes across like a boxing promoter.
	It's amazing.
	That's, that's one of, that could be one of his jobs.
	It's not, though, actually.
	I want to do a little bit of background because people probably aren't that familiar with where he comes from.
	So speaking of jobs, in the late 70s, he was working as a night manager of a McDonald's and the Bronx, and he left there to found the Magnificent 13, which is a group of predominantly black and Latino men, plus a few white men like Curtis in the mix.
	Most people know them by their second name, the Guardian Angels.
	In the popular imagination I grew up with in the 80s, they were a bunch of tough guys who patrolled the street combating crime.
	They were very much like Batman figures.
	I was going to say, I even heard about them growing up in Johannesburg.
	Like I knew that there were these guys called the Guardian Angels in New York City who were like, you know, standing up to crime.
	Right, because it was a much different New York City back then and the media was also different.
	Remember, this is when there was only three networks and then local news, of course.
	But when stories about stuff like this got out, it would be spread everywhere because you didn't have bifurcated media.
	So the Guardian Angels were definitely in the imaginarium.
	Two images I remember from my early visits to the city were those dudes in their red berets and a Hell's Angel club that used to congregate by a police station in the East Village.
	And they were all guys you didn't fuck around with, but you knew that if you weren't fucking around, you'd be fine.
	So that's really where Sliwa gets his street cred, which is a real thing.
	In the early 80s, Ed Koch launched an investigation into them and the report came back so positive that they basically became ordained as part of the fabric of the city.
	Now, later on, Sliwa admitted to lying about some of their supposed heroics, but there were some real ones too.
	And he said that he did those ones just to make people aware of the crime problem, which again was a real thing.
	Like if you can remember the images of just subway cars covered in graffiti on the seats, like I rode those cars.
	I remember that time.
	That was absolutely real.
	Sliwa did piss a lot of people off, however, because he was, he was very much like Trump again in the media all the time.
	In 1992, he was first attacked with a baseball bat.
	And then two months later, he was shot in a cab by John Gotti's goons because Sliwa had talked shit about Gotti's dad on his radio program, a program that he had until he rage quit just this week because he was so pissed off how much his station was promoting Andrew Cuomo in the last few months.
	Now, we'll see if it sticks because he rage quit while guesting on someone else's show.
	I was really hoping you were going to give him his flowers by mentioning him getting shot by the Gaudi family because to me, he seems a bit like Giuliani and 9-11, the way he tries to work.
	I was shot by the Gaudi family into every conversation, right?
	Oh, right.
	He was.
	But he really was.
	Yes, he absolutely, he will bring that up on in the two debates so far.
	We're mostly covering the first debate.
	The second debate was just as funny.
	He did his don't glazing me thing in Mamdani.
	But he will work it into any question possible to make sure people know.
	But at the same time, it's just like he doesn't get national press, like in general.
	So, of course, he wants people to recognize where his credibility sort of comes from.
	Yeah.
	The dude also doesn't appear to be loaded, which sort of brings us to the title of this episode.
	Sliwa is a longtime animal rights advocate.
	He lives in a 320-square-foot apartment with his wife and 16 cats, all rescued from the streets of New York.
	In fact, he's turned that into part of his platform because he showed up outside of Eric Adams' home with two cats that he said would help the mayor control the rat population.
	It's amazing.
	But hold on.
	Does this mean he's a childless cat, Daddy?
	Is he kind of the opposite version of Conval Harris?
	No, he's got three kids, but they're older because he's been married three times.
	Okay.
	So they're out of the house.
	So right now, apparently, the New York Times covered him.
	I'll drop it in the show notes if you want to read about it.
	This is from the last time he ran in 2020 against Adams.
	Yeah.
	But he, yeah, that's where he lives in this tiny.
	I can't imagine sharing an apartment, 320 square feet with a person, much less 16 cats.
	And the New York Times reporter in that article noted that it didn't smell in there.
	And Slilo's like, oh, we changed the litter three times a day, which is a Herculean task to actually do that.
	I couldn't even imagine.
	It still doesn't seem like enough at 16 cats.
	I know.
	I don't know how many, because you're supposed to have one litter box for every cat plus one.
	That's the rule, right?
	So we have two cats.
	We have three litter boxes.
	Okay.
	Right.
	So you have each one has their own and then you have a safe.
	So that would mean there would be 17 litter boxes if he was following that convention, which I don't think he is because that's just too you don't have enough room in 320 square feet.
	Too woke.
	That's too woke there.
	So Sliwa is a Republican in thought, but not in appearance, at least not in MAGA's America.
	He's no lover of Mamdani, let's be clear.
	He thinks socialism will be the death of the city he loves, which is pretty thick given how little of it Mamdani will probably actually be able to accomplish.
	I mean, hopefully he'll get some in.
	That's the whole point because unfettered capitalism has not been great for New York unless you're exceptionally wealthy.
	And at heart, Sliwa is an old school New Yorker.
	It means he does not have a filter, which brings us to the debate.
	And again, we're talking about the first debate here.
	How did this dude even earn the Republican nomination for one of the most consequential cities on earth?
	Well, this time he ran uncontested.
	New York isn't immune to electing Republicans.
	Remember, Giuliani and Bloomberg was an independent.
	Bill de Blasio is the closest thing to an actual Democrat in charge of New York since David Dinkins in the early 90s, because Eric Adams is certainly not a Democrat.
	And Gasp Dinkins was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the same affiliation as Mamdani, which makes it funny that all these people are like, we've never had a socialist.
	It's like, no, you had Dinkins who very much had similar messaging, perhaps not as upfront.
	And again, it wasn't a national race in the 90s, but he was on, he was affiliated with the same fucking party.
	And still, despite all of this, no one in the Republican Party stepped up to run against Sliwa, and the state party endorsed him.
	So that's how we arrive at this moment.
	There's a lot of gems from the debate, but I just want to play this one.
	The question is pretty hilarious itself, yet it does speak to something important to some New Yorkers.
	You have all said that you want to be mayor for all New Yorkers.
	So will you march in all the parades that mayors have traditionally marched in, or are there any that you would boycott?
	Mr. Sliwa?
	I think a mayor has a responsibility, whenever possible, the march in parades to celebrate whatever that parade is performing at.
	I've been a Grand Marshal of the Pulashki Day Parade.
	I was proud to celebrate the public.
	Are there any that you would boycott, though?
	I just need to move this along.
	Excuse me?
	Would you boycott any of the city's parades?
	No, I would not boycott any parades.
	It's a mayor's responsibility to be available to all racial and religious groups.
	No, I wouldn't unless they discriminated.
	Okay.
	Mr. Mamdani.
	There are many parades that I would not be attending because I'd be focusing on the work of leading this city.
	Which parades?
	Number one.
	I've already missed a number of those parades because I've been able to.
	Can you tell us?
	Speak to as many audiences as possible.
	Okay.
	I don't have the list of all the parades I've missed.
	Wow, that's a lot.
	Let me ask you this.
	Are there any parades that don't exist that you think should?
	Mr. Mamdani?
	I haven't thought much about parades, to be honest with you.
	Mr. Cuomo?
	I have not thought.
	I don't even know what parade doesn't exist.
	Could be for anything, Mr. Sliwa?
	Every parade has the right to exist in New York City.
	I would ask you.
	Thank you.
	Would you protect the Christopher Columbus statues that exist here in the shady?
	I'm telling you, my focus is on affordability.
	I'm not thinking about it.
	He's not answering the question.
	He's not answering the question.
	He gave the finger to the Columbus Day issues come up.
	That's what we call it.
	All parades matter.
	It's so amazing.
	Oh my God.
	I mean, now they've got him.
	They've got him because he's refusing to, he's avoiding the question of which parades he would boycott.
	And I think his instincts are really accurate, just to like dismiss this.
	It's not a serious question.
	I'll be focused on more serious things when I'm mayor, but they're trying to posture and it's so transparent and superficial.
	I love the pandering toward the Italians.
	And then also Mamdani's best line in this whole exchange is, I don't have a list of all the parades I have not attended.
	It's perfect.
	Someone on threads decided to dig into Sliwa's claim, hoping to out him.
	And they only discovered dozens of photos of him as Graham Marshall or a participant in every parade imaginable.
	This dude loves parades.
	It should be actually what his platform.
	You see him with like a bunch of Asian women.
	You see him at a trans parade.
	You see, it doesn't matter.
	He is there and in the mix.
	And he's been doing this apparently for a long time.
	So the person on threads is like, look at this.
	Here he is on every single one.
	And this actually brings up an interesting paradox that's not unique to New York City, but it is part of the mindset.
	The dude founded a vigilante group made up of predominantly black and Latino dudes while New York was experiencing one of its worst crime waves ever.
	While he still feels everyone deserves representation, he's literally marching alongside people of every ethnic background imaginable.
	It points to this very in-real life reality that never plays well on social media, where you can always get outed for the slightest possible grievance.
	And I think sometimes people overlook the fact that tolerance and acceptance don't always have to require understanding or companionship.
	And those qualities are still way better than hatred.
	Sliwa is certainly ignorant about a lot of shit.
	And I imagine the person that would be the first to say that is Curtis Sliwa.
	Yeah, it's like he's a throwback, right?
	He's a throwback to a time when the patriotic American like meat and potatoes thing is to say everyone deserves representation.
	Everyone deserves to have a parade.
	I support all of it, even though like I don't hang out with these people or those people necessarily or understand what their, what their platform is about.
	I'm still going to support it.
	Sliwa would be very comfortable sitting in a lounge chair next to Archie Bunker.
	They would have a great conversation and then Meathead would come in and Sliwa would agree with him sometimes because being from that part of New York, that is how he would react.
	And every time in all these debates, he's just like, when Cuomo would agree with him, he said, don't agree with me, you asshole.
	Like you're a sexual predator.
	Like that, that attitude.
	And again, I just, I bring this up and it's really one of the points that I wanted to do this episode because again, I'm not endorsing this dude, but when you're in a situation where if someone says the wrong word and then a mob comes after that person online and they know who they are in real life, it doesn't surprise me that it turns people away from causes.
	We talk about coalition building all of the time and it is so reflective of people who don't actually live in places like New York or come from those places that are very diverse.
	And I am sure I am going to be on the record 100% sure that Sliwa has dropped the N-word hundreds of times around the people in the group with him and they rolled with it and they're like, there's that white dude again.
	Like, and I'm not advocating or endorsing that, but I'm saying in real life, situations and circumstances do not reflect what we see on social media and the way that people think you're supposed to act in all situations.
	And Sliwa is that character, as hateful as he can be in certain regards, as ignorant as he can be, but also as real as he is.
	And I think that that sort of attitude in the age of authenticity plays so much better than when you're hearing people trying to craft messages all the time.
	Also, going back to that clip, I love both Cuomo and Sliwa revisiting a Sopranos episode with fucking Christopher Columbus.
	Now, to be clear, that episode is based on something very real in North Jersey and the Bronx.
	For some Italian Americans, Columbus is their dude.
	And this stems from a very real time.
	It's when Italians were treated as dirty immigrants during the waves of immigration in the 1880s through the 1910s.
	And since they were like, your country is literally named for one of us, show us some respect, especially since those immigrants were responsible for a lot of the actual structural building of major cities here.
	This is all before post-colonial studies were a thing.
	And I personally think they need to let that shit go, but it's still pretty funny when it comes up.
	Now, after the debate, the rest of the clips I'm going to play come from after the debate.
	Sliwa was interviewed by a YouTube journalist named Nate Friedman, who, to be clear on a few things, he's not a fan of Vomdani.
	He uses his channel to expose hypocrisies on the left.
	I don't know a lot about his work.
	I've seen some stuff that I definitely don't agree with.
	So I'm not endorsing him.
	I'm only sharing one response to the question of whether Sliwa is harming Cuomo's chances of beating Momdani.
	I think it's a very interesting question.
	I'm not sure what the two said about Bill Ackman before Friedman's question, but his reply is, Sliwa's reply is pure gold.
	Now, for context, Bill Ackman is one of the douchiest billionaires around.
	He's a supporter of Trump.
	He supports the Netanyahu government.
	And he uses his Twitter feed to dunk on anything slightly left of center.
	Well, number one, Ackman is a jerk.
	Has he been right yet?
	Here's a guy who goes up to Newport, Rhode Island, and thinks he's a professional tennis player.
	Come on, Ackman.
	Stay in your lane.
	Does he know anything about politics?
	No.
	Does he live in New York City?
	No.
	He lives in Chapico, the whitest suburb of America where even the lawn jockeys are white.
	He may know Wall Street.
	He may know hedge funds.
	He has been wrong every step of the way with the billionaires.
	Yeah, so Ackman is clearly a carpet bagger and he's just whiter than white.
	It's amazing how he gets these shots in.
	Yeah.
	And, you know, that is actually comes from a video.
	And when he says, come on, like, he's talking to Nate Friedman.
	And when he says, come on, Ackman, he turns to the camera and looks right at it, Deadpan.
	It says that.
	And again, I just, there's something about someone.
	Like after the second debate, Sliwa came out and he said that the Republicans have offered him $10 million to drop out of the race.
	Wow.
	Now, again, and I don't know if that's true.
	That's only his claim.
	You're a dude who lives in a 320 square foot apartment with 16 cats and your wife, and you're offered that kind of money.
	I'm sure if that's not actually true, I'm sure there are some incentives that have been given to him to get out of the thing.
	He's like, fuck all you guys.
	He even quit.
	His only source of income that I know of is his radio gig.
	And he quit that because they were going too hard for Cuomo this week.
	So for all of these reasons, for all of these reasons, we are officially endorsing Curtis Sliwa in New York City.
	I'm endorsing him to be on social media more.
	That's about the only endorsement he's going to get because I couldn't even imagine.
	Well, you know, I couldn't imagine him having any sort of bureaucratic or administrative skills, like even knowing.
	I mean, he did run an organization, but I don't know what that entailed.
	If he's taking care of 17 litter boxes three times a day, he's got some organizational acumen.
	That's a good point.
	Maybe we'll have to reverse our endorsement here.
	Well, okay, so I clipped one clip into three just for discussion.
	So here he moves on to Cuomo, which I'm splitting into two parts.
	So let's say people come to the conclusion, if somehow I lose, and we know Andrew Cuomo's lost, he's already tossed in the town.
	Oh, it's because of you, Curtis.
	Because really?
	It's because of the Democrats.
	What is he?
	Who created Johan Montami?
	Who embraced him?
	Who nourished him?
	Who supported him?
	And how dare you, people who know nothing about politics, suggest that everybody who's going to vote for me is suddenly going to be reborn.
	We love Andrew Cuomo.
	He killed all these elderlies, the sexual harassment.
	He told conservatives and Republicans in 2014.
	If you're a conservative and you believe in right to life and the Second Amendment, you have no place in New York.
	You need to leave.
	This is the result of the Democrat self-destruction.
	Wow.
	You need to clear this up for me, Derek, because when I hear this whole way, the storytelling, the mocking impersonations, this whole kind of extroverted, you know, just say whatever comes to your mind attitude.
	I'm like, oh, he's, he's kind of like Trump.
	Is he imitating Trump?
	And then I'm like, wait, if they're, are they just like part cut from the same cloth?
	And it doesn't matter what the political orientation is.
	This is how that personality type from that particular region of the world does this sort of dance.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And you can really see it on the debate stage.
	And again, returning to my comment on authenticity, you see Zohran laughing at questions.
	You see Sliwa shaking his head and jumping in and be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
	What you see in Cuomo is someone who grew up in the same environment.
	He's a New Yorker, but someone who has been trained to be a politician.
	He grew, I mean, obviously with Mario, his father, he grew up in politics.
	So he's trained to be very, very poker face, very, you know, and not lash out.
	And in certain environments, that has worked before.
	But in the environment we're in right now, when you see that, you're like, there's no emotion.
	Like he was on, Cuomo was on Morning Joe and Anand Gerhardis Haratis was interviewing him and went hard with some really good questions.
	So good.
	Really good.
	Like not like Sliwa, not poking him, but going there in a sort of in a roundabout way and just bringing in all these accusations without actually saying the thing.
	And same thing, Cuomo just sits there without any emotion whatsoever.
	And that's not how people actually interact.
	And Sliwa, so coming from the same environment as Trump and Cuomo, the same, relatively the same age demographic, there's an attitude where you're just like, you look at the guy and it's like what he said with Ackman.
	It's like, come on, you fucking know who you are.
	Quit trying to, quit trying to pretend you're not that person.
	And Cuomo will not give in.
	He will not cave.
	And so he seems very stiff and robotic.
	Eric Adams also seems very stiff and robotic in those situations.
	And so and so it creates this real, real difficult thing because you just see these people and you're like, you can tell they're not authentic.
	Yeah.
	And it seems like that's a, that's a big piece of the enthusiasm about Mamdani is that he represents from the Democrat side, something completely different than Democrats are actually getting, you know, really lambasted for over the course of the last year or so, which is that you're, you're, you seem manicured.
	You seem very cautious in your responses.
	You're, you don't seem able to like express anything authentic.
	We don't know what you really believe or what you're really going to do because you're trying so carefully to make sure you don't offend anybody, right?
	Yeah.
	And Sliwa, you know, he says this is democratic self-destruction.
	I think he means it in one way.
	I think it's true in another way.
	And I think they do intersect.
	But the way that I think it's true is that you have a party that refuses to, I mean, Hakeem Jeffries just came out today and is now endorsing Mamdani.
	But the fact that it took them so long and the fact that the Democratic Party hasn't wanted touched anything close to socialism, which we're really just talking about social services here, right?
	We're talking about things that'll make like it's it blows my mind that the Democrats go and the whole shutting down the government of healthcare, which I agree with, and all their messaging is about affordability.
	And then you have Mundani who's like, oh, here's some ways we can make it more affordable.
	And like, we can't touch you.
	And it really shows the hypocrisies that exist within the Democratic Party.
	And that's where I think like there might be some intersection.
	What Sliwa is saying, like Slila is basically saying, you guys can't figure your shit out.
	And now you have two of you that are running against each other.
	So why are you going to come at me?
	I actually got the endorsement of my party and I'm represented by them and you're going to tell me that I shouldn't be here.
	That's bullshit, which he's completely correct on.
	But I also think that the Democratic Party, you know, and we saw it with Graham Plattner.
	Now, obviously, that's a whole different story with the past week in the tattoo, but you also see a populist coming out and the Democratic Party refusing to endorse that person.
	And you can't keep going with the conflicting message.
	You can't keep saying, we're going to make life more affordable for you.
	And then when you have people who actually put forward really strong messaging for it, you can't turn from them.
	Yeah.
	I mean, it's this whole dilemma around populism and the media environment that we're in now and the reality that populists come across as more authentic, even when they're full of shit, even when they're spreading conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, right?
	They're just to a huge swath of Americans, they're just more believable and they've become absolutely allergic.
	Like the Democratic brand has become toxic in terms of that cautiousness, which we can then say is sort of adjacent to how public health officials try to talk about things like COVID and vaccines.
	So it's just in this real predicament.
	But I do think that we need Democratic candidates who have that authenticity and who are leaning into that populist appeal while maintaining integrity and being connected to facts.
	Right.
	And it's interesting watching both Mamdani and Plattner because Plattner comes from the military and working for Blackwater, but also apparently historically seeming also left on issues.
	And now he's forced to play politics in a way that I don't think he expected he would have to.
	And you're seeing Momdani do the same thing, like, you know, having to go to synagogues.
	He was on Flagrant this week, which I'm sure part of the leftist base hated, but he was very comfortable in that environment because he can move through circles very easy because he comes from New York City again, which is somewhere where you have to move through numerous circles.
	Yeah.
	And he's not going on a podcast like Flagrant thinking, well, I have to give XYZ kind of performance and I better not say ABC.
	He's just like, I'm going to go on and talk about what I think and what I believe and where I'm coming from.
	He's very, very good at that.
	Yeah, he's excellent.
	And so, I mean, that is one thing the Democratic Party really needs to learn from because, I mean, he's moving.
	I don't want to say moving to the center, but he is moving toward becoming a more establishment type politician.
	Because how are you going to run a city where you have to have relationships with the fire department and the police department, where you have to have relationships with Wall Street, where you have to have relationships with the Jewish population and having a past like that?
	Like you have to build some bridges at some point.
	And so watching him, you know, he does seem to be a little bit more careful with his language and his messaging now, which I know pisses some people off.
	But that is actually what we've talked about for a long time in coalition building.
	And what do you sacrifice and what do you keep?
	And that's, that's a question that, I mean, the Democratic Party as a whole has to answer right now, but you have to be willing to engage with people that you think are coming from the populist side, especially because their messages resonate with most of us, at least non-mAGA, most of us.
	Okay, so let's wrap it up.
	Let's play the second part of that exchange.
	So I'm supposed to help them.
	How come they don't help themselves?
	Andrew Cuomo failed everybody in that primary.
	He even admitted it.
	Now he's basically saying, I can't win without Sli-Wa votes.
	Where are your votes?
	Why did you spend your money and they got millions from the billionaires?
	Millions.
	Go out, get your own votes.
	Convert Sli-Wa voters.
	But for me to drop out, I represent a major party line.
	I have people running under me, council people, judges.
	They put their heart and soul into it.
	They support me.
	I have more donations than Andrew Cuomo does matching funds.
	So you know something?
	This is called voting.
	Since when do we not let people vote?
	Billionaires determine the next mayor?
	If they don't like it, they can leave.
	They have options.
	Blue collar working class people don't.
	Those are the people I'm representing, not Andrew Cuomo.
	Yeah, it's so interesting.
	It's like his messaging is almost straddling into Mamdani's lane, even though we know that blue-collar people didn't really aren't really the ones responsible for Mamdani winning that primary, right?
	I'm also like, I'm not so sure that all the people down ticket would really give a shit if Curtis Levot dropped out, but you know, what do I know?
	That's true.
	But what he's saying is if you're voting party line, like I am the party.
	But I mean, yeah, he's he's self-aggrandizing a little bit there.
	But that was honestly like what I love about that moment is it's one of the clearest explanations of what democracy is supposed to be.
	And it's just, he's just like, you just think people are going to rush to you if they, if I drop out?
	That's not, they won't, they won't come out.
	You know, they're, they're not, they're not going to, they're going to stay at home or they're going to write in me or something else.
	Like, don't just assume that.
	And, and I just love that one line where he's, he's like, then convert them.
	Take them from me.
	Go for it.

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