Byron Brown

Hi, hi, hi, hello, hello, welcome.

So, yeah,

this was going to be my episode.

It has been going to be my episode for about 15 years at this point.

I'm so sorry.

The thing is, what it is, is I have to read one guy's book.

334 pages.

Not, you would think, a huge obstacle.

However, the universe is conspiring against me.

I should never have given that Korean kid the passing grade that he didn't earn in the physics midterm because now it's just, it's all going.

It wasn't your fault.

That was a culture clash.

Culture clash.

It's

all going against me.

Right.

So

I was like, okay, fine.

Fuck it.

I'll get up early.

I'll read the book this morning.

Yeah, it's like a paperback.

It won't take me that long.

And then I get out of the shower and I'm like, that's odd.

That's the strongest smell of gas I've ever smelled in my life.

Is that good?

That's odd.

That's not supposed to happen.

That's not, yes, you're not supposed to.

You're not supposed to do that.

So

I call the whole sort of like family together and I'm like, hey, am I insane?

Or is that the strongest smell of gas you've ever smelled in your life?

And everyone's like, yeah, no, that is definitely the strongest smell of gas we've ever smelled in our lives.

So we call Scottish Gas and they're like, just fucking turn off everything and like flee the house.

and open all the windows.

So we do that.

I should also mention for context, it has been what passes for a heat wave here.

And so for like three days, I've been baking and I've been going, man, I wish it would fucking cool down and rain.

This morning, cooled down, torrential rain.

So with all the windows open,

getting rain in the house, standing outside waiting for somebody to show up.

The funny thing about gas, right, is you get this from Wilfred Owen poems too.

It turns out you don't really know how bad the whole gas situation is until you get out of the gas.

And then you go, huh, I've got a splitting headache, probably from the gas.

And yeah, and I feel like I can't breathe, probably because of the gas.

But yeah, so eventually, like, engineer arrives.

They are lovely.

However, I will note, they got here at like something like 1 p.m.

or something.

It's 6 p.m.

recording.

They're still here.

We've adopted them.

They're a member of the family.

They want to come on the show.

Yeah, I mean, I should ask, to be honest, because both because they genuinely are lovely and because like they have been here for five hours trying to chase down why gas.

And the answer is two distinct, three distinct leaks, in fact, one of which has just been leaking out of the gas fire the whole time we've been living here, which explains how good my posts are

and why I'm like this.

So, yeah,

they're working on shutting that off so we don't just have three days of no gas and no hot water.

And that's still doubtful.

That still remains to be seen.

We may endure that.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Well, we need the hot water because you have a steam-powered computer.

Correct.

I understand.

Correct.

And then we finally got the aukele to switch the electricity back on, at least, and that took out the internet for about two hours.

Jesus.

I was meant to be recording Kill James Bond.

So if anyone wants to know where the latest Kill James Bond episode doesn't have me on it, that's why.

And so we get out of that into like a very short notice house viewing.

because the landlord is selling the flat and trying to evict us.

We do that.

The house is nice.

You know, we're probably going to apply to it.

Get Get back and find that also in the course of the torrential rain, the roof has leaked and like soaked a bunch of stuff as well.

So,

yeah,

I think I need to go to church about this.

I think you definitely need to change that kid's grade back.

I also think that, yeah,

it's not going super well over here.

And so I apologize.

No worries.

So the good news is today you have a substitute teacher, which is just me, because I had my notes prepared for my next mayor anyways, because I am a maniac.

This is beautiful.

Thank you.

You were like, you know, ruthlessly prepared.

And meanwhile, I'm like, oh, sorry, I can't do the episode again today because wild dogs got into my apartment and like bit me several dozen times.

So I have to go and get like shot.

I have one question.

Well, no, I'm worried because

the landlord did a viewing while the house was essentially like a kind of well, you know, the landlord did a viewing while the house was essentially the zone from stalker.

Um, was the viewing successful?

Well, this is the thing.

Part of the reason why we're getting evicted is because he has sold the house.

Someone came in, inhaled enough gas, like missed the leaking roof, and was like, yeah, fuck it.

I could buy this house, I guess, for an amount of money we will, like, never be able to afford.

So, um, that's, yeah.

Point of order.

If there's enough gas in the room, it's more of the zone from the the zone of interest.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Jesus.

Also,

I am worried because I need to get up and walk around.

Sorry.

Yeah, don't do that.

You want to heal too much gas.

Riley's house has fallen down.

Your house is full of gas.

I'm really concerned what's happening to me next.

Because if you guys remember, if you both remember, girls,

we did open that tomb in Egypt all the time.

We opened the oldest one.

I mean, the thing that happened to you is your loafers thing, but I.

want my loafers where a daylight?

Yeah.

I'm like graphing this situation.

It's like it escalates, right?

Like, so your loafers are a daylight.

Riley almost gets killed by falling masonry.

I have the terrible, horrible, very bad no-good day.

And throughout this, the jokes go to from like, oh, that's bad that that happened to a serious man to fell out of the guard tower.

So I.

Can we, okay, can we transition from

a very terrible, horrible no-good day to wonderful, fantastic, no gods, no mayors.

Can we transition to the podcast that we do?

I mean, yeah, sure.

But I feel like bitching about your day at work is a sort of essential protected.

No,

for sure.

I mean, listen, we're around the water cooler, which is what I call it when I'm drinking a seltzer near you.

I got a zero

zero Heinekens when I got.

Oh.

I've got a Schwepps resident.

I got fucking nothing.

I got.

I'm raw dogging it.

I'm drinking

because I just basically

I'm taking my listeners to TF will know that I, at time of recording, by the time this comes out, I will have been back for a bit.

And I'm taking my annual holiday.

And this one, I'm splitting two trips into two weeks.

So I was in Portugal for like some wine stuff

for five days.

And then I'm spending a few days at home and I'm going to Berlin in a couple of days.

So I basically am trying to...

I don't know why.

I have no idea why I'm doing this.

I'm trying to inbox zero my fridge and be like, oh yeah, some Udon noodles.

I could fry up some Udon noodles and say some oil.

No, no,

the fridge inbox zero is very real before you're about to go away.

Like that's that's 100%.

Icebox Zero.

It's right there.

It's so simple.

I have to do everything around here.

First, I got to do the episode.

Second, I got to get ice box zero.

This is fucking good.

You did the punch up from a serious man to this car tower as well.

You literally are carrying, it's like there were three sets of footprints on the sand, and then there were just two as you carried both of us like sacks of potatoes along the beach.

beach listen up you worthless potato women welcome to no gods no mayors i am your mayor for this episode my name is maddie lepchansky i am joined as ever by my deputy mayors finally and november we have so much to get through sorry first up it is municipal roundup aka item cattle call yeah

item item let's all gather around the item tree the very first item i've shaken the item tree and out of it has fallen a boy mayor with actual power.

Terrifying.

Yeah.

Tell me about this boy.

Tell me about this boy mayor.

Yeah, brain is basically.

So there is a wee lad, a wee lad named George Finch.

And George Finch, the in his seems likely for him to be in a tree if his name is Finch.

Go on.

That's right.

That sounds like the name of an online store you specifically buy sweaters from, Riley.

Oh, yeah.

No, I'm going to say sweaters, no, socks, yes.

I think it socks.

But yes, absolutely.

George

Finch, excuse me, is 18 years old.

Sorry, 18 years young and is now the leader of the Warwickshire County Council.

Not technically a mayor, but a local elected official.

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Yep.

So

for what has he been given this like poison chalice of being in charge of a like local council for?

So

I just looked up what Warwickshire was real quick, and what I got was a picture of a stone house, just one.

So I'm assuming it's that?

Yeah, that's called Warwick Castle.

I've been there as a child.

Yeah, me too.

I think, yeah.

Riley, have you been to Warwick Castle as a child?

I have not, but I have been shielded from Warwick's frown.

So a reform UK counselor, basically.

The guy, Rob Howard, stepped down.

From have I got news for you or whatever?

From panel shows?

Yeah, yeah.

The panel show guy who's now a sort of elderly reform counselor in Warwickshire.

stepped down after only being in office for 41 days citing health problems.

He said, this has been a very difficult decision to take.

The role of leader is an extremely demanding one.

And regretfully, my health challenges now prevent me from carrying out the role.

You've got to do all that jousting.

Like, it's a serious burden.

You know, you want an 18-year-old in that.

Well, yeah.

I mean, you can see why for the jousting elements, you'd want the 18-year-old and you wouldn't want a sort of sickly older reform council.

Like the chief responsibilities of

the kind of Warwickshire Council, like the jousting, the wassailing, like sieging as well.

You got to do some of that.

Chevoche.

Oh, yeah.

You have to be executing Lollards.

And there's actually a quota system now that's been put in place.

So now the council is incentivized to trick people into kind of reading the Bible aloud with their finger under it.

Lollard enforcement officer.

I'm doing a lot of Googling this episode.

On air.

So anyway, anyway.

So Howard steps down and then George Finch steps up because they had like an old, they had like kind of a political Harold and Maud situation where it was like a very

a political one.

A political herald and political gray garden situation.

Yeah, sure.

They had two, it was a sort of political Tuesdays with Maury.

And

Tuesday is election day here in America.

Yeah, Tuesday was Tuesdays with political Maury.

How about Super Tuesdays with Maury?

There we go.

So

Finch basically, George Finch, the 18-year-old deputy leader of the council, now is de facto leader of the reform-controlled Warwick County Council.

And to be clear, this only happened because a bunch of like labor and conservative-run councils were swept out of office at the local elections by reform.

Yeah, by people who were like, wait a minute, why was I elected?

I did not expect to be elected.

From deep within jousting helmet.

Yeah.

so in a statement finch said sorry that's the this medieval uh no gods no mayors of the palace um two of my co-constables yeah no gods no constables two of my co-hosts are always saying i should i should transition and whenever they refer to me as a dame i go oh from behind my jousting helmet we're trying to get you to convert to the cathar heresy and you won't do it like all your friends are cathars and you know a lot about like cathar culture but you're like no i won't ever do that i i used to live in the cathar party mansion and then both fucking damn it, dude.

Ever since you told me about that, I've been mad that it wasn't me.

It's crazy.

It's crazy that it happened.

Anyway, we haven't read this into the record.

Riley used to live in the lesbian party house.

Yeah, this was a thing that literally the other day I was talking to my friend who she's like online, but she's not that online.

She has a regular job.

It's my friend who listens to the show, hello, Rachel.

And she doesn't listen to Trash Future or doesn't know about Riley from previous things and just knows Riley from this show and said to me, Riley sounds so happy when he's joking about transitioning.

And I told her about the lesbian party house.

Yeah, the fact that you, the lesbian party house that you used to live in.

I told that to all my friends, all my like real life friends are now becoming aware of the amount of

goofing off about transitioning Riley does in private.

We're going to do a live show in New York after the border gets more normal and you are going to be pelted with estrogen.

Yeah, I'm also going to get you just right in the neck, which is not where you're supposed to go.

There's going to be subcutaneous or intramuscular.

No, I've gotten them right in the jugular.

We're doing like intraosseous perfusion.

We've got the big like multi-needle thing.

We're just stabbing in.

Oh, yeah.

No, it's like basically there, there's, it's like a Vickers gun of syringes full of estratile.

Like I just fully die because you can't have that much of any given hormone.

I hit Riley with the pulp fiction shot to the chest.

Yeah.

Full of mushroom.

Yeah,

was it rubbed on the skin or injected?

No, no, headshot, actually.

It was very clean and right between the eyes.

And then it was double tap back of the head, mafia style.

I haven't fit it for a pair of high-heeled shoes.

They gave him the Bushwick necktie.

Which is funny.

I don't know.

Okay.

So, sorry.

Oh, yeah.

The boy mayor.

The boy mayor.

The boy mayor.

So, George Finch, an 18-year-old who's now in charge of a half a billion pound budget.

Again,

elected council leaders in Britain kind of don't have that much power.

It's much more like the city manager or the CEO of the council that has the actual power.

All the council does is like

take some decisions, set strategic directions, but the permanent staff are actually quite powerful.

So, anyway, Finch says, as interim leader, I will ensure that this council is in steady hands until a new leader is elected so we can deliver meaningful results for Warwickshire.

And he's like, you know, I'm going to do everything I can as the county leader for Warwickshire to tackle illegal.

I'm going to find and kill Robin Hood.

Yeah, to tackle illegal immigration.

I know that's Nottinghamshire.

I hope we're all still following my bit where I think that Warwickshire is just Warwick Castle.

Yeah, where it's the one bit of England that's still fully medieval instead of just like half medieval.

Warwickshire like exists within the Lego castle universe.

Yeah.

To become the mayor, you have to kill that dragon.

It's just as a weird hinge only on the top of its head, but no neck.

So far, he's only done one thing as boy mayor, which is he.

Stop dragonhing at me.

Is he, you know, dragonhing?

I'm not sure I'm not hallucinating this right now.

Is he a dragonhing?

Maybe I got out of the shower this morning and I was like, huh, that's the strongest smell of gas I've ever smelled in my life.

And then I fell down and hit my head really hard.

And these are my dying thoughts or imagining you two jokers.

I just have a question for both

my co-host Riley and also you, the listener.

which is, when November goes to sleep at night, do you guys like going into the big black void because you no longer exist?

I'm going to fucking send you all into the big black void like permanently in a second by killing myself.

Yeah, I think it's nice.

It's nice.

Cause that's sleep for us, right?

We're reborn anew every day.

Yeah.

Not after this, no.

Well, it's sleep for you normally.

With

us, we actually only live for like however long you sleep.

Ah, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

It's new ones every time.

Yeah, can we finish this item today?

Oh, shit.

Yeah, we have so much to get through.

Anyway, the one thing he did.

The one thing he did is he has gotten into a basically a knockdown drag out fight with the chief executive of the council trying to remove a non-standard pride flag.

Yeah.

Specifically say non-standard.

Yeah, the one with all the stuff on it.

Yeah, it's that there are a certain number of flags that legally can be flown by councils without them having to like apply to do so, right?

So that you can't fly, for example, a little chef flag at the council.

Like you're not allowed to do that but the pride flag the sort of ordinary pride flag the one that most people see um the most the one that most people think the remote one is like is is like so far like standardized but the the progress pride flag one exactly the one that looks like you were like like gay was invaded by uh like intergalactic checks

yes yes exactly you're not allowed to fly that one without like planning permission.

So he basically found that out is now engaged in an all-out war against the CEO, trying to get the progress pride flag taken down, which is his main thing he's doing so far.

Instead of tilting at windmills, he's tilting at pride flags with a big lance.

He's trying to hook it.

So Monica Fogerney, the chief executive,

sent an email to Finch saying that the local authority did not have any kind of formal policy for flying flags and that she suggests flags come in this little like pre-waving like plastic shape and they're all like bifurcated and they slide them onto the top of the flagpole.

It's like

however this has been made a national cause celeb by the Reform UK party, who's saying that it's like, it was saying that the chief executive is doing a coup d'etat over the progress pride flag.

Nigel Farage basic said that she believed she, quote, knew better than the people and should look for a new job.

For their part, the labor leader in the opposite, one of the opposition groups in the council said, I fear an 18-year-old is inter-leader of the council, risk throwing him in the deep end.

Running a council with a 500 million pound budget is not the place to learn on the job.

The labor leader is, of course, a year old yes yeah of course an experienced 19 year old all right that was my item uh sorry we kept getting distracted by

wow a beautiful a beautiful item roundup with one item

so look sometimes you only rope one dogie someone yeah only one doge has been roped um

i've just shifted the item i was going to do onto a different podcast uh okay

So welcome back to the show.

I'm the mayor.

So I'm really this week.

I'm going to leave my comfort zone of maniacs from the 1800s who founded a utopian commune in the mother's backyard.

We love this.

We love that for you.

Yeah.

I love those.

They're a lot of fun.

This one is a news peg.

Isn't that fun?

Oh.

Would you like to know what the peg is?

Please.

We'll get back to it later.

Go ahead and go ahead and start pegging.

Like, I don't.

Can you say I have a little pegging music, please?

Let's not.

Let's not have Sam cut in some food house, please.

I don't think that's what?

How did you live in the lesbian part?

crazy uh this week we are talking about buffalo new york and its first ever black mayor and its longest ever serving byron brown there's a chance you know the news peg but it's okay we'll get to it later byron brown of buffalo town

so buffalo new york if you know me i'd like to set a little table

scene sure um and i think western new york is kind of not really thought about that much like it's a new york state would you like to know the one thing i know about uh buffalo new york is that you can make a whole sentence out of the word Buffalo?

No.

Wait, no, I know two things about Buffalo.

What's your two things?

The wings?

My two things about Buffalo and not the Wild Wings.

My first thing is Buffalo, New York, the town that killed William, Big Bill McKinley.

That's correct.

And the town that almost killed Teddy Roosevelt on his way to

rush to the bedside of a stricken William McKinley?

Correct.

The other thing that I know about Buffalo, New York is that it had a previous mayor who was.

Wait, no, that may not even be Buffalo.

Okay.

I know those are the two things I know about Buffalo, New York.

I know that Buffalo had a previous mayor.

No, no, no.

I know that a town that may have been Buffalo had a previous mayor who became known as Six Pack, whatever his first name was, because there was this massive storm coming in.

He was like, literally, just go home, get a six-pack of beer, and watch a good football game on like VHS.

That's the oh, yeah, that's uh six-pack uh James D.

Griffin of Buffalo, New York.

Well, I knew, I knew knew three things about Buffalo, New York.

Future guest or guest just now.

You may also need to remember, re-Buffalo, New York.

I grew up in Niagara in the Lake, which is the closest big city, Buffalo, New York.

Yeah.

So you know about Buffalo, but a lot of people don't think about New York, about Western New York too much, which can be thought of better as like a sort of a 50% Midwestern locale.

Like it's got that post-industrial vibe.

It's a classic of like the Rust Belty kind of aware.

area.

For those who aren't aware, Buffalo had this massive boom in the mid-1800s when it was the terminus of the the newly built Erie Canal.

Later, it was a big steel town.

Like most American centers of heavy manufacturing, it's been on the slow decline, despite having, you know, it's got like the nice architecture from its booms and like nice parks and stuff.

Insanely beautiful, right?

Like

that whole bit of like upstate New York is, right?

And it is now a, despite being a very white part of New York state, is a very non-white city.

It is about 40% white and 35% black.

Is this another like sort of like Detroit, your kind of like white flight from like urban centers thing?

Yes.

Yeah, very much so.

It is very comparable to Detroit in a lot of ways.

So our guy, Byron Brown, was born in 1958 in Hollis, Queens, also the former homes of Colin Powell, Mario Cuomo, and Russell Simmons.

Anyways, his father worked in New York's Garment District and his family lived with his grandparents who were immigrants from Montserrat in the Caribbean.

His mother worked at the City College of New York library.

And he's a big suit guy.

You know, and you read articles about, you go back and read about guys and they're like, he wore a suit to school.

And it's like, yeah, can you imagine a man in a suit?

Incredible.

The traditional USE and huge suit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, and one day, uh, while trying to think of a cool new outfit for his stop making sense performance, a young David Byrne traveling through Buffalo said, wait a minute.

Yeah, he was, he was a menswear.

He was a menswear guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this is in Queens still.

And he's big, he's big on the NBA

and he wanted to play basketball himself.

He was in particular a fan of the Buffalo Braves Braves guard Randy Smith.

The Braves later, the San Diego and eventually LA Clippers for my hoops heads out there.

The NBA, the real sort of like origin of the USE and huge suit that is huge, not because the suit is huge, but because the man wearing the suit is huge.

And so that necessitates it.

That's right.

The USEN huge suit.

Yes.

So Brown went to the same alma mater as this guy, Randy Smith, which is Buffalo State.

His NBA dreams were quickly squashed as he rode the bench on like the junior varsity team.

Oh,

that's sad to

go to a specific college because you want to be like your sporting idol.

And then you find out that you're maybe not so good at that sport.

You find out that you're 5'9.

I would hate to find out that I was 5'9 because I would have grown three inches.

I would love to find out that you're gonna be 500.

You're ready to get off the bench.

You rip off your tearaways, and under it is just a very breathable suit

you're gonna play basketball in.

I mean, that's basically.

This is like Gavin Newsom, though.

This is Gavin Newsom, like sort of failing failing into politics by being bad at varsity sports yeah so he switches focuses he switches his focus to poli sci and he works on some local buffalo campaigns and he wanted a big corporate job um right i'm reading here from a news a source called news bank which is a website that existed in 2005 and i do a lot of sifting around the wayback machine to get a bunch of info on this guy because his political rise was early 2000s which is all like lost media completely right out of college brown worked as a regional sales rep for bristol myers later bristol myers a squib.

Nice salary, expense account, company car.

He liked the job, but quickly realized sales was not going to get him to the upper echelons of corporate communications.

So he quit.

He took the state troopers exam and eventually opted for a job as chief of staff to George Arthur, who is president of the Buffalo Common Council, which is their city council.

He spent a question.

Yeah.

He took a state trooper's exam.

And then did nothing with it.

Yeah, that's right.

As sort of as a kind of prestige.

Just to finding out that you're 5'9 again.

Like, it's just a really rough time

it's just like we don't actually have a hat small enough to fit you into um i mean as i understand it all like uh

like municipal or state level like uh examinations for for like civil service jobs in new york are kind of like this like there's a bunch of people who take like the uh like dsny exam the nypd exam and the fdny exam uh never hear anything for like 20 years because there's a billion applicants for all of them and then just take the first one that answers them.

Yeah, that's but that's basically true so i think it was just him trying to get into like the civil service uh game although although although he said right oh i took the state troopers exam oh no i didn't get it could we be facing a departed situation here

maybe

you like coming to work every day dressed like you're going to invade poland i mean new york state trooper uniforms are in themselves even weirder like the hats are weirder yeah the hats are weird do they wear the little jodpers am am I making?

They do wear the little jodpers, but the hat is this kind of like

almost fedora looking thing.

It looks like half fedora, half straw hat.

And the weird.

Take a look.

Oh, yeah, those fucking things.

Yeah.

And the New York State Troopers, when they're not getting sexually harassed by Andrew Cuomo, I have seen them wear the weirdest high-viz jacket I've ever seen on a person, which is a full-length, high-visibility, fluorescent, like Western-style duster, like a trench coat.

With a purple tie that's great yeah yeah now now dutch here we always said it was safety first

so he spends two years with that guy george arthur two more with a county legislator called roger blackwell and two more working for uh the deputy speaker of the state assembly every boomer's bio is like this when i read one it's always like he wandered around with his dick out and he tripped and fell down and he landed as chief of staff for the town council yeah it's it's kind of you just kind of end up doing whatever like it's really purely down to like one state police like exam guy whether or not Byron Brown ended up doing this or being a state trooper, you know?

Yeah.

So he ends up as the director of the Erie County division of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is where Buffalo is, Erie County.

And he's there for eight years, most of the 80s and into the 90s.

During this time as well, he gets linked up with a new political club called Grassroots.

The club itself was founded in 1986 with the intention of getting some like neighborhood problems solved in Buffalo, mostly by black residents, but it grows into this much bigger club.

And it's a big player in like Western New York Democratic politics for a long time.

It still exists.

And it's still one of those things you got to go talk to them if you want to

become a politician in Western New York.

So in 93, he gets his political career off the ground in earnest.

He runs for the 11-person Erie County, County legislature, but he loses to a guy who's still more hooked up with the local Democrats.

This is a very interesting thing because it comes up again later, but sort of backwards where he is like the young insurgent and he's with this group, Grassroots, and they're trying to like and they are considered young and like against the uh the democratic establishment of western new york is this gonna become is this gonna be a tale about these guys becoming the democratic establishment of western new york november yes okay uh very much so uh so at night it's because because they were challenging the democratic establishment in the 90s which at that point was basically like local power players and like you know a bunch of national guys who were like you know terrified of finding the govern around every corner yes it was just like how easy to challenge them.

Guys who are about to get handed them, handed their ass by George Stephanopoulos or whatever.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, exactly.

In 95, he primaries a Buffalo City Council member, David Collins, one of the guys he campaigned for while he was in college, betrayal.

This guy's been in the council for 18 years and Brown just fucking demolishes him.

Like 5,300 to 1,600 votes.

He also wins the general and he wins election again in 97 and 99.

His tenure, I was really rooting around for something, but it's pretty inoffensive.

It seems effective enough.

He's got the highest approval ratings of anyone on the Common Council in Buffalo.

Is this a situation where he's like the only one under 50?

Yes, I think so.

So he's merely in his 40s.

So in 2000, he runs for the New York State Senate.

The incumbent, which is this guy named Al Coppola, was another guy from the Buffalo Common Council who had been appointed.

Oh, I thought he went by cage.

Sorry.

Sorry.

I'm signing because.

Sorry, I'm going to draw the clock now.

Yeah, no, I'm signing because it's pretty good.

It took me a second, but it's pretty good.

So

he's another guy from the Buffalo Council who had been appointed after a vacancy earlier that same year.

So this guy's been the state senator for like a couple of months.

Brown beats him in the primary pretty handily, but Coppola and an echo of the future also stays on in the general election.

And they have this incredible, like itchy and scratchy relationship that I ended up digging into for several hours because I found it so funny.

And I'm just going to read these and just let me read them all because it's incredible.

Okay.

Okay.

2000.

Brown beats Coppola in the Democratic primary for the 57th district.

2000.

Brown beats Coppola in the general, who's running on the conservative working families and Green Party lines.

2002, Brown beats Coppola in the Democratic primary for the 57th district.

2002, Brown beats Coppola in the general election where he runs as the Republican.

2004, Brown beats Coppola, Democratic primary, 60th district, they renamed it.

2004, Brown beats Coppola in the general election where he also runs as the Republican.

2005, Brown beats Coppola in the Democratic primary for Mayor of Buffalo.

2005, Brown resigns from the Senate seat, so Coppola amounts a bid for the empty seat in a special election.

He loses the primary to his own cousin, cousin Mark, who had succeeded him in his old common council seat.

2006, he runs now in the now, the now

non-special Democratic primary for that Senate seat against his cousin Mark and Byron Brown endorsed guy named Anton Thompson.

Thompson wins.

2008 doesn't run for anything.

2010, he runs again against Thompson, the Democratic primary for the Senate seat, and loses again.

2012, he runs in the Democratic primary again, comes in third.

2014, 2014, loses one more Democratic primary.

He's 72 and then gives up.

Incredible.

This guy's sort of like the Ahab of Byron Brown specifically, you know,

pursuing him and just running against him, his own cousin, and a guy that Byron Brown endorsed.

Just like from hell's heart, I run against thee.

Also, I love that he in 2008, he's like, okay, maybe,

maybe this, the last eight years have taught me.

So he took a year off a work-life balance and then

right back to the grindstone.

Yeah, you got to do like crop rotation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyways, Brown is the first ever black state senator, not from the New York City Metro, which is kind of a big deal.

He's in the state Senate, which where he doesn't do much.

It's at this point.

It's just the machine politics that they were able to successfully like keep being racist for that long in that way.

Oh, yeah.

And also the problem is at this point in the New York State Senate, it is dominated by Republicans.

He is, however, he's big on gambling and and he's a big supporter of the state allowing up to three casinos to be built on Seneca land in western New York State.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

Let me just tell you, I saw some fucking commercials for those in Canadian colours.

I sure you did.

So controversially, these were going to be the first with slot machines and not just video gambling.

In 2003, when the first casino was opened, he's appointed to the seven-member commission that was to apportion the state's like agreed share of the slot machine revenue.

It's about $40 million.

Jesus.

This comes back.

So in 2005, the incumbent mayor and former Kanishas Golden Griffin basketball player who was drafted by the Indian Pacers and never made the team, basketball echoes municipally.

I think it's the most municipal sport.

We can kind of establish that.

Like, what's our second precept?

Oh,

the Sarah Palin noseball.

That's right.

Yeah.

So one of a listener wrote in the other day, and I can't believe I didn't clock this while we were talking about it, but one of the cities that you can stay in if you're going to Floating Man in Libraland is Nikola Jokic's hometown.

It's all basketball.

I feel like Thomas Pynchon.

It's all

there's a secret.

There's a hidden hand.

There's a web beneath the surface of the world.

And the hidden hand is dribbling a basketball.

I was going to say the hidden hand is dribbling the earth.

Spinning the earth on one finger.

So this guy who's the former Kanisha, Kanishi's is a college in Buffalo or nearby.

This guy, Anthony Macielo, he says he's not seeking a fourth term.

And during his uninspiring tenure, Buffalo has been hemorrhaging jobs and people.

There's like a really crowded field, both in the Democratic primary and the general.

Six parties, four candidates.

New York is weird, and you can multiple, you can run multiple lines.

He wins the primary and the general in a walk, Brown.

Brown does.

So we're in a slowly dying post-industrial American city.

So you know what that means.

Sam, can you play the revitalized waterfront music?

It's hitting city city authentic.

Yeah, so this one, I found an incredible article from Newsbank again that just has the best lead I've ever heard in my life.

You can tell Bette Midler the joke's over.

What?

Did Trump write this?

What the fuck?

Who can forget how the divine Middle Edition?

The joke's over, Midler.

Who could forget how the divine Miss M of all people struck a community-wide nerve during a show in Buffalo four years ago?

This is from 2008.

I haven't been here since 1978, she said at the time.

I love what you've done with the waterfront.

The crowd roared, no more!

Like an Edgar Allen Poe story?

Yeah, I don't know.

So they, they revitalized the waterfront.

The crowd, no more.

Incredible.

So they sort of fix it.

The waterfront a little bit.

That's one of his big deals.

The other one is a...

So the third of those three casinos that were approved with him and support in the state senate is going to be built, not on Seneca land, but in buffalo proper when brown takes office uh which is like a new thing that the the native american casinos in new york state started doing um it's got a lot of local opposition it's like this very bitter fight uh a federal judge briefly blocks it but it's going to get built and uh critics say the nearby casino in niagara falls has not done much for that city despite the casino doing just fine you know um the main concession maddie have you ever been to niagara falls new york just as a quick no oh my god i'm the only one of the three of us here i'm sure we might we have like a lot of listeners.

I'm sure maybe someone out there has been to or possibly even lives in Niagara Falls, New York.

Niagara Falls, New York, genuinely, for like several different reasons that have all come together, you genuinely feel like you're walking through an early area of a Fallout game.

It's cool.

Yeah, it's like because it was, that was the aesthetic that Niagara Falls, New York was built in, and then it was maintained not at all.

Oh, great.

Cool.

It is, it is an astonishingly grim place, place, except for the Seneca Niagara Casino, which rises out of Niagara Falls like this giant glass or comparatively giant glass skyscraper, just totally dominating the landscape.

At the risk of referencing a sort of popular television show, it is genuinely like the Imperial Arms Depot they built in fucking Andor as it towers over the town.

It is a very, very, very, um it is a horrifyingly ill-treated place yeah um so they want to so citing that not really doing much for niagara falls the place they there's a lot of local opposition uh brown gets a concession out of the casino uh like a five million dollar investment in local infrastructure and a promise to hire half of its staff from within the city so i got a new york times article here from 2007 where i just found like this incredible thing where They have like a

gambling industry consultant saying like, oh, luring gamblers here might be a long shot.

I find it difficult to look at Buffalo as a competitor to Atlantic City or Las Vegas or the Catskills.

It takes a lot of time to get there.

And once you're there, you are in Buffalo.

Oh, put it on the signs.

Yeah.

Byron Brown is quoting.

Welcome to Buffalo.

You are currently here.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Our position was not to argue that a casino is good or bad.

Those decisions were made at a higher level, said Mr.

Brown, who made a point of saying that he is not a gambler.

As mayor, my responsibility is to protect the interests of the community, which is a crazy thing to say when you are a big supporter of the casino getting built a couple of times already.

Anyways, the casino opens in June 2007.

I hope nothing bad happens to the economy.

I'm sure it's not.

I'm looking at my notes.

It's fine for the next forever.

So some other first-term stuff.

Buffalo faces a very similar issue that we talked about in that Kwame Kilpatrick episode.

There's a lot of vacants.

There's like thousands and thousands of vacant homes in Buffalo.

In 2007, Brown committed $100 million over five years to demolish 5,000 of them.

Is that too few for that amount of money?

It's a lot of money per house, I'll say.

Hey, I have another question.

How come the

mayor's, chief of staff, and a bunch of the guys who work at the

house demolition company all seem to have gold Lamborghinis?

Let's not worry about that right now.

Why is the steamroller?

Why is the steamroller bejeweled?

So this gets them in national.

How come the wrecking ball is the Hope Diamond?

This gets him in national trouble with like the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

They're like, hey, why are you spending this much money to demolish 5,000 historic houses?

The governor at the time, Elliot Spitzer, who I think never had any scandals and fine.

He was fine.

He's back, by the way.

I fucking knew it.

He suggests that maybe the money should go to rehabilitating 10,000 homes instead.

Thanks, Elliot.

Homicides continue to rise, and there's like bad urban decay.

And he joins Mike Bloomberg's like Mayor's Against Illegal Guns thing.

There's a local controversy where Brown fussed.

against illegal guns again man

it's like maga the big guy in the middle of it like do you want me to draw the clock again i'll draw the clock again hold on please draw the clock thank you we've had november draw a clock a couple of times now to make sure she's doing okay after the gas leak yeah yeah it's uh yeah uh anyways in uh 2008 there's local controversy where brown refuses to criticize a local police practice of the buffalo police department also known as the bpd uh withholding information from people BPD.

He refused to criticize a police practice of the Buffalo Police Department calling you and then saying, I hate you and I love you in the same sentence.

So the BPD is withholding information from the public from police reports.

That's a clock.

Normal.

Thank you.

Having to do this every five minutes is not my favorite part of our new workflow, but

I'm doing the Pomodoro method, but it's making you draw a clock.

There's local uproar around the transparency and he just refuses to comment on it.

I found another incredible local controversy from 2008, whereas Brown has dispatched the local police and also police from the burbs, a SWAT team, Erie County Sheriffs, the chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosives unit, armed vehicles, a canine unit, and a mobile command to an end of semester celebration at Canesius College because Brown lives in the neighborhood.

Just some local kids are nearby.

Call the bomb squad.

Yeah, call every bomb squad in the world.

But

I ended up on a message board.

There's some underage drinking.

So we're going to the Gary Oldman from Leon the Professional.

Yeah.

But I found an incredible message board talking about it.

And I just, I just loved someone saying, like, yes, there's been some minor incidents in the past, which includes Byron Brown's own son stealing his dad's car while under the influence and hitting other resident tail sick vehicles.

But instead of Mayor Brown owning up to his son's mistakes, he seems to be punishing all of Kanishi's students.

Wake up.

Incredible.

I love that kind of local argument.

Yeah.

So in 2009 comes around.

It's time for more hoops.

We're hooping again.

It's all hoops.

It stretches all the way down.

Yeah, I'm reading a local news headline here.

Rivera demands FBI probe of

Brown Stokes allegations.

A Buffalo Common Council member is calling for a federal investigation of Mayor Brown.

At a press conference Sunday, Niagara Council member David Rivera said he will ask the FBI to look at allegations that Brown obstructed a police investigation.

Well, the problem is Stokes.

The problem is all the FBI agents are tied up

arresting teens for being too loud.

Yeah.

Well, hey, if this is, this is 2009, the entire FBI is looking at Quave Kilpatrick.

That's all I've seen.

They're all so busy.

Yeah.

So this guy, this guy, Leonard Stokes, who's a former basketball star and former owner of the One Sunset restaurant in Buffalo, was picked up by police two years ago on suspicion of using a stolen handicap parking permit.

A Buffalo news story alleged the mayor intervened to keep Stokes from being charged.

Brown offered no comment on the allegations, claiming only that he believes this is politically motivated.

I know this restaurant, not literally, but in the sense of like, this is the one nice restaurant in town type situation.

They're doing a bunch of like city authentic stuff at this point, I imagine.

Yeah.

Rivera announces that Brown has attempted to silence the police officers who apprehended Stokes by sending a defense attorney to talk to them.

According to the news, both Daniels and his spokesman for the mayor

deny the mayor has retained the service of that lawyer, Daniels, but Daniels would not comment on whether he had any informal contact with the officers.

This broke right before the primary, but he skated on to a win anyways.

He runs unopposed in the general that's 2009.

Best I can figure at this point, he's mostly just fucking around in state politics.

Also,

I happened to like this happened to make it over into Niagara on the Lake

news at the time, but that also

like the Brown administration propped up one sunset for a while.

Really?

Yeah.

Government restaurants.

It's time.

Yeah.

It was.

So basically,

yeah, like the Ministry of Economic Development gave $160,000 to one sunset and no one could find where it went.

Incredible.

That rips.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but he's mostly at this point like fucking around in state politics.

He doesn't seem to be doing much in Buffalo.

He's close with Andrew Cuomo.

He breaks ranks with grassroots, that political order, and he backs Hillary Clinton over Obama in 2008.

Like he's a delegate.

He gets not much more gets done, you know, in Buffalo.

They renovate an Amtrak station, I guess.

He eliminated parking minimums for new buildings, which is cool and good.

Easy win, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He wins a third and fourth term handily.

He's primaried both times, but he manages them and the general just fine.

He is the mayor in 2020 when, if you remember that viral video of an older gentleman named Martin Gagino gets pushed down by the cops.

Yeah, just like slammed in the back by like

pushing everyone forward.

And he just falls down and like cracks his head and like they walk over him.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's in Buffalo during the BLM protests in summer 2020.

And then in 2021, he is up for election for a

record-setting fifth term.

And we have hit the news p.

Oh, yeah.

So he is, you know, he's mostly uneventful, normal sort of like centrist liberal mayor.

He's not doing much of anything huge, but the city is functioning.

I don't know, fine.

He's like a replacement-level mayor.

He seems to have like replacement-level levels of corruption for like the mayor of a post-industrial town in the Northeast.

It's like nothing like that fascinating happens.

And

so the primary rolls around and he faces a compliance clerk for the Buffalo 311 line named LaCandis Durham.

and a nurse slash activist named India Walton.

Why does that name ring a bell?

Well,

about India.

She was born and raised in Buffalo.

She dropped out of high school at 14 after giving birth.

She moves into a group home for young mothers.

She has twins after getting married at the age of 19.

She gets her GED, studies nursing at SUNY, Erie after

being inspired by the care her prematurely born twins received.

Previous to this, she was involved with her mother, who's a pharmacist, protesting mandatory drug laws with a group called Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

which is like the Rockefeller laws that are known as.

After working as a nurse and rep for the 1199 SCIU, which which is a very, very powerful union in New York State, if you do not pay attention to New York state politics, she's eventually hired by Open Buffalo, which is a nonprofit devoted to what they say is major long-term improvements in justice and equity in Buffalo.

And she's also involved in the local Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the local DSA.

Castle Thunder.

Yes.

DSA politics.

So she says that seeing the assault on Martin Cagino by the Buffalo police inspire her to run for office.

Brown formally announces he's running for a fifth term via a Facebook video, but doesn't seem particularly interested in motivating his campaign for any real reason.

Well, though, his reason is basically that he doesn't know how to do anything else.

Yeah, the reason for him being mayor is that I'm the mayor.

Yeah.

So the primary is June 22nd, 2021.

An article I found going through his campaign disclosures on June 8th, 2021, said that he had about 275 grand on hand after raising about 330.

In the previous primary, he raised about half a million, which means he spent 75 grand total.

He did not air any television ads during the primary.

He refused to debate the other candidates.

His biggest expense.

He doesn't even want to be mayor.

He's Cuomo.

This is called the Rose Garden approach, I believe, in politics.

It's just like, don't, if you are so ahead in the polls, do not acknowledge that you have any opponents.

His biggest campaign expenditure in the primary was $10,000 on lawn science.

In this house, we believe.

And then it's just blank.

Just a Byron Brown question mark.

2021, I think.

In this house, we believe that the casino is fine, I guess.

One sunset is worth preserving.

And

that basketball, that they should let five, nine guys play basketball.

So there's also like signature minimums to get on the ballot, you know?

And very often, campaigns will turn in like many, many, many times the number of signatures they need to

for a lot of reasons.

Like names will get struck, you know, by the election board for eligibility, but it's a big show of force.

Like early in the campaign, they like to tout the numbers they get.

Buffalo's signature minimum is 2,000.

And during like his second campaign for mayor in the early 2000s, Brown collected 20,000 signatures.

For this one, only six.

He commissioned no polls either during the campaign.

Don't need them.

It's just

miles ahead.

So, yeah, but he basically like, look, look,

you know, I've read the tortoise and the hare, and I'm pretty sure sure I remember it.

I've read the first three quarters of the tortoise and the hare.

Just keep reading the next, like, increment of that, then eventually, you know.

Yeah.

I found a June 2021 article about Brown's, like, Brown's, like, non-campaign.

On social media and in press interviews, Walton and her supporters have cast Brown as an arrogant, disengaged, and cowardly.

His refusal to debate is nothing short of a disgrace, Walton said in a press statement.

The Buffalo News editorial board agreed.

On June 1st, Brown met with the Buffalo News to seek the newspaper's endorsement.

In the meeting, Brown explained to the editorial board that it would be a dereliction of duty to take time to debate his opponents.

That's how busy he is, the editorial board wrote sarcastically, noting Brown's endorsement interview with the news lasted no longer than a debate would.

Brown's intransigence disrespects both voters and democracy and amounts to, quote, cheating the public of the opportunity to compare the candidates.

The editorial of the editorial board wrote in their endorsement of him.

Oh my God.

That's a really New York Times moment there, I feel.

Very much so.

I do really also love that he fancies himself a philosopher king who has no philosophy at all.

Yeah.

He's like, he's like, no, it would, you cannot begin to contemplate the vastness of my Emersonian.

It's like this guy, this guy, he's not even

what he is.

He's Emmanuel Macron.

Like

this is Jupiterian mindset applied to Western New York.

Yeah, also from this article, Brown's website is bare bones.

It doesn't offer a platform or any summary of his policy positions or any plans for the future.

There are links to donating to the campaign or requesting a lawn sign.

The site doesn't list his endorsements, which includes several unions, the Erie County Democratic Party and the Buffalo News.

It's so cool, though, that he's basically putting on a political campaign as like performance art, but from the early 90s.

Like this is of just being of just being like a satire of political campaigning.

It still seems to be

so far.

Yeah.

Yes.

That's exactly what I was thinking of.

He's the okay cola of politics.

Byronbrown.com, by the way, for sale.

If you want to hear him buy that ironically, just like campaigning ironically.

Yeah, and redirect it to.

Oh, God, ByronBrown.com is going to redirect to no godsnomayers.com as well.

We genuinely could make that happen.

Has the London, Kentucky Chomo Parade happened yet?com redirects to ByronBrown.com, which redirects to no gods, no mares,

which redirects to patreon.com.

You get the like too many redirects errors.

Sorry, I've actually, I've found Byron Brown's manifesto.

It is, what is the point of Byron Brown?

Well, what's the point of anything?

Byron Brown emphatically rejects anything that is not Byron Brown and fully supports everything that is.

The better you understand something, the more Byron Brown it turns out to be.

Byron Brown says, don't be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything.

Byron Brown reveals the surprising truth about people and situations.

Byron Brown does not subscribe to any religion or endorse any political party or do anything other than feel like Byron Brown.

There is no real secret to being Byron Brown.

Byron Brown may be the preferred politician of other people such as yourself.

Never overestimate the remarkable abilities of Byron Brown.

Please wake up every morning and vote for Byron Brown.

Anyways, it is not like India Walton has a lot of money on hand, only about 130,000, and it's all small donors.

Her platform is like very exciting to people.

It's like sweeping police reform and rent protections, a land trust putting property development under more democratic control from neighborhood to neighborhood.

This seems like a very, you know, like the developers are very, I would say, racist in Buffalo.

The designation of Buffalo as a sanctuary city, a public bank, requiring food stores to carry fresh produce, lots of nice, like doable stuff.

Late in the campaign, she picks up a bunch of endorsements, a handful of DSA adjacent state legislators, including a newcomer named Zoron something,

a New York City public advocate, Jermaine Williams.

This puts her over the top.

She wins the Democratic primary by about seven points.

Only 20,000 people vote in it.

Brown does not concede for like a week, but the local Democratic Party falls in line and says they're backing her.

So great.

It's, again, sort of Cuomo-esque.

Yeah.

So great episode.

Goodbye, Byron Brown.

Oh, oh, no, no, it says, never mind.

Oh, oh, okay.

Yeah, sorry.

The local real estate developers, big donors to Brown, threaten to run a writing campaign that November if Brown doesn't.

So he does.

And the business community very quickly starts freaking out in a very familiar way.

The local developers and various rich people coalesce and they're writing like Doomer Facebook posts about AOC and her friends from Queens are taking over the city.

Anyways, a quick googling of her name and local news outlets to the dates around that time.

I'm seeing a lot of like manufactured scandals, like an accusation from a former landlord that drugs are being sold out of her house.

Someone's finding old Facebook comments to make her apologize, you know, this kind of stuff.

Oh, sure.

They're irregular like monstering.

yeah they monster her big time in the way that like she got corbined yeah like they corporate like it's the same that we see over and over and over and over and over there's maybe one thing that's less manufactured but the details are kind of unclear the buffalo news in august of 21 publishes a story that walton had been arrested in 2014 for harassing a coworker uh but the details are murky and it seems like a work beef that got out of control and the coworker decided walton who is a four foot 11 nurse was dangerous to her uh-huh she's definitely not playing basketball.

That I'll tell you that much.

Anyway,

this comes out after the co-worker's husband

met Byron Brown at a fundraiser.

So that's interesting.

Okay.

Isn't that interesting?

I mean, sometimes you just meet someone and it like jogs your memory that actually you were intimidated some time ago by a four-foot-11 woman.

Yeah.

In September 2021, the Buffalo News publishes a report that Brown, though, is under an investigation by the FBI, despite no charter as being on the way in the middle of the year.

They finally pulled like one guy off the Kwameko Patrick case.

But it was a very confusing story with a lot of moving parts to it.

But the long and short of it, best I can figure, is in that May 2015, agents raided the homes and offices of three political operatives in the Buffalo area, including a political consultant named G.

Steven Pidgeon, known as Steve Pidgeon.

Excuse me?

G.

Steven Pidgeon.

G.

Steven Pidgeon, which you're going to go insane reading about this guy because I did it for a day and couldn't find anything good for the episode, but it's like he's a late-breaking guy in this story who's also both name and also worked for Nexium for 10 years.

He has the name of like a burn after reading character.

His name is G.

Steven Pigeon.

G.

Steven Pigeon.

Yeah.

And he, him, and

Steven Pigeon.

So that's my best.

J.K.

Simmons.

What did we learn, Palmer?

No.

Nothing.

Well, what we learned is not to hire the guy who worked for Nexium for 10 years, I guess.

So Pigeon's home, and office is raided, as well as the former deputy mayor Stephen Casey.

Raiding a pigeon's office or punch, I guess.

You know, it's actually very easy to raid their nests because they're often just a pile of sticks because they're used to roosting on the cliffs.

It's, it's, we tried to breach and clear, but we couldn't find any doors.

You should be able to go on like a pigeon walk, and you're excessing.

Oh, God, by the way, rat walk news.

My rat walk was scheduled for last night and it was canceled due to the literally the second wettest hour in New York City history happened while I was scheduled to go on the rat walk.

God, I hope the rats are okay.

I hope the rats are okay.

I think the rats may be controlling the weather.

Just sort of like actually hoping the rats are okay.

It's kind of antithetical to the spirit of rat walk though.

Yeah, I hope the ratzar isn't listening.

So the offices are raided.

This guy, yeah, Pidgin and this guy, Steve Casey, who is the former deputy mayor, who is intimately familiar with City Hall operations and the mayor's political campaigns.

There's a bunch of investigations in Pigeon's various dealings.

Stop.

And maybe City Hall and Brown's connections back there.

Some pigeon detectives.

It's really too bad.

You know, Steve Pigeon, he ate some raw rice and he was one day away from retirement.

Exploded right from within.

The pigeon detective asked him about this, but he was like, I'm not sorry.

Yeah.

So, oh, but Pigeon had worked for Brown and he was also an associate of Andrew Cuomo, so much so that he went to jail for four months in 2018 for illegal donation schemes.

He also went to jail again.

He's a cool pigeon.

Yeah, he also went to jail again in 2023 for sexually abusing a child.

Cool guy.

Andrew Cuomo knows how to pick him.

Yeah, he sure does.

Again, like, I can't believe that the guy who worked for Nexium for 10 years turns out to be dangerous.

Yeah, and also loves Andrew Cuomo.

Weird.

I love how every time Andrew Cuomo is like, here's one of my guys.

It's like a fucking like, he's like dripping in oil.

It's very fine.

It's covered in iodine.

So

Brown tries to get on the ballast, the ballot on sort of a BS like Buffalo Party ticket.

And a Trump appointee judge named John Sinatra, whose brother is a Brown donor, lets it go.

They are not related to Frank Sinatra.

I checked until an appeal strikes it.

Unless they are, and I'm wrong, which don't write in.

The ballot will have one candidate on it, India Walton.

So Brown stages a write-in campaign and his signs spring up around the city at the homes of prominent business people and various right-wingers.

Guy just loves the sign.

He loves the sign.

He loves the sign.

He receives significant donations from Republicans who also start sending out mailers on his behalf.

Publicly, he distances himself, but it is clear the Republican money spends just fine.

Brown distributes push stamps with his name on it so people can just stamp his name on the ballot, which is legal.

Just crazy to me.

That's fucked up.

That's not a write-in.

That's something else.

Yeah, it's a stamp in.

Yeah.

I love that show.

Kathy Hochul, governor at this point, because Andrew Cuomo has, I'm looking here, resigned in disgrace, by the way.

She refuses to endorse India Walton.

The New York State AG, Tish James, refuses to endorse, which is crazy to me.

Jay Jacobs, the head of the New York State Democratic Committee, refuses to endorse Walton.

He has asked what kind of precedent this sets, you know, if you're not going to endorse the winner of the Democratic primary.

And the example he gives is, what if the grand wizard of the KKK won the primary?

Jesus fucking

that a black woman winning what if what if that

does she just quickly i's completely zoned out when you talked about everything that india walton is does and stands for that's a fair comparison yeah that's correct okay good thank you yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah uh so and is any of this sounding familiar hmm and a shocker uh brown decides to debate walton for the general uh but he picks up endorsements from thomas swozy currently in the news for going insane about zoron a bunch of rich people the buffalo news a bunch of big unions including the AFL CIO and the local UAW chapter.

And Brown wins the election by 20 points via the write-in campaign.

Jesus Christ.

He says himself of it.

I think it is clearly a rebuke of Defund the Police.

It is a rebuke of socialism.

And I think there were those from outside the city of Buffalo that underestimated the Buffalo community.

They tried to come in and tell us who to vote for, and the people fought back and we won.

He said Thursday morning on CNN.

The idea that like the local DSA chapter is not Buffalonians,

you know,

it's

outside agitated.

He is sworn in for his record-setting fifth term in 2022, and he doesn't do shit else as mayor because in September 2023, he announces his register, his resignation in order to take a job as president and CEO of the Western Regional Off-Track Betting Corporation.

And his resignation takes effect that October.

The resource.

Like, even when the left wins, they still have to lose so that this guy can sit in office and be mayor for like five minutes longer and then go and be a gambling lobbyist.

And then cash in.

Cash in big time.

Also like OTB crazy, it still exists.

Yeah.

I found an article on Hellgate recently.

It was India Walton's advice for Zoron.

And she says, this is the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Even when a person is batshit crazy, as long as they're charismatic and fill certain requirements, the Republican Party coalesces around them in public.

They do their fighting behind closed doors.

But if they come out with a unified strategy, even if it's dead wrong,

Republicans stick together with their kind against their big enemy, which are mostly poor people and black and brown people.

The problem is Democrats have the same enemy that Republicans do.

They're not fighting against Republicans.

They're fighting to enclose power and wealth.

They are beholden to their donors and not the voters.

One mistake I think we made, an unforced error, was trying to be friendly with the people who knew, who I knew were trying to take me out.

Instead of staying true to my message and my base, I moderated.

I started changing my message to placate who I thought would have been a traditional moderate Democratic base.

I'm not talking about voters.

It was the party that I was trying to get acceptance from.

And I think that is an interesting lesson to learn about Democratic politics.

Yes.

Because people hate the fucking Democrats and you can simply keep winning by hating them in public too, even if you are running on the table.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like within and against.

It's not as though like, you know, Jay Jacobs is beloved by the actual people who are going to be voting in the election.

In fact, Jay Jacobs probably isn't from fucking Buffalo at all.

He's someone who is essentially coming from outside Buffalo, telling people from Buffalo, hey, you know how the police can basically kick your ass all the time and

the city is like tens of thousands of derelict buildings that all seem to get like demolished for $10 million each or whatever.

You love that.

You think that's great.

So look what's people who fucking hate these people.

Yeah.

When you go down to like, when like the SV, the detectives on like Law and Order go down to like the dock and there's people like unloading boxes, the guys aren't like, and i love that jay jacobs i'll do everything

he says uh

that was me uh knocking a scale model of my own teeth off my desk um

you keep tiss james' name out of your fucking mouth

yeah the the tiss james thing is crazy to me uh actually that she refused to endorse i don't know what that was about Well, I mean, think about it this way, that they've got the numbers because they've got Liz Smith, Liz Smith's alt account, Liz Smith's other alt account, and it just goes on.

Yeah.

I can't believe she has not reared her fucking head in any serious way yet.

I can't believe we're not seeing Liz Smith on the airwaves 45 hours a day.

And you don't know, you know, somebody could be wearing like a big latex mask, rubber head, and it could be Liz Smith under there.

Yeah, Liz Smith is in the IMF, but forgetting socialists not elected.

She pulled Tom Swozy, pulls off his head, meets Liz Smith.

So, anyways, that's my mare for the day for the week.

This was a beautiful, infuriating time.

Yeah, and I just think it's an interesting case study in what can happen if they really get the knives out, which is why everything right now is so fascinating.

Ever trust the Democratic Party for even a second, they will kill you and everyone you care about.

Yes.

I mean, that's just true.

That is flatly true.

Like, Liz Smith will kill you in the night.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I want, I want him dead.

I want his constituency dead.

I want every hand he's shaking to fall to the ground.

Anyways, so that was, that was, that was no gods, no mares.

This is a free episode.

You could, you could join us next week on the Patreon for a mere $5 a month.

You get double the mares.

I believe next week, Nova will have finally expelled all the gases from her body.

Oh,

Jesus.

Something else will have happened.

A plane will have crash-landed on my fucking house.

From the wreckage, who will you be telling us about on the Patreon next week?

You know, I almost don't want to spoil it.

Okay,

it's that good.

Well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily.

Okay, fine.

I'm going to talk about Robert Briscoe, Lord Mayor of Dublin.

Ooh.

Briscoe County Jr.

himself.

Let me tell you, being Lord Mayor of Dublin, one of the least interesting things about this guy, and he knows it.

The problem is everything else that happened to him.

So interesting.

His book starts with him getting kicked down a flight of stairs and then shot at by two sides independently.

I'm very hype about that.

In the meantime,

this coming Tuesday, from where you are listening to this show, my new book, Simplicity, is out, and you should buy it by going to simplicitybook.xyz, link in the show notes, and also come see me on tour, which I'll also put a link to in the show notes.

I will be

in many cities in the eastern and midwestern United States.

Many.

And I know how to talk.

I can't do it.

Many places.

Many places.

Many faces of yours.

Well, I'll see you.

Maybe what?

Maybe one day in London.

Who can say?

Next Next year in London or something.

Last year on Mario and Bob.

Okay.

All right.

See you later next week on the bonus.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.