Cuomo, Jewish Champion, Aged Gladiator

Posted on July 21, 2025 by First.One.Through

Weekends in the Hamptons Synagogue are times to hear from politicians but infrequently a political war room. That changed on July 20. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, political veteran and bruised warrior of Albany, came down from the bleachers and into the pit—this time, to describe the battle with far-left ideologue who had somehow captured the heart of New York City’s radical alt-left: Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Cuomo stood before a predominantly older, anxious crowd—not in his home borough, but in the summer home of hundreds of Manhattan’s Jewish residents. Rabbi Marc Schneier introduced him warmly, a gesture that symbolized more than courtesy. It was a call for a lifeline from a community watching its city slip into madness.

From Apology to Attack

Cuomo opened with an apology for his lackluster primary campaign, acknowledging what everyone in the room already knew: Mamdani’s young, radical left had shown up to vote, and Cuomo hadn’t shown up at all. But that was going to change. Cuomo pledged to fight between now and November—and then made a pledge to follow the suggestion of former New Jersey Senator David Paterson, that if trailing Mayor Eric Adams in the fall polls, he would step aside in September to avoid splitting the anti-Mamdani vote. He implied Adams should do the same.

*Former Governor Andrew Cuomo addressed crowd at the Hamptons Synagogue in Westhampton Beach, on the dias with Rabbi Marc Schneier, on July 20, 2025 (photo: First One Through)*

“fueling antisemitism”

In responding to a direct question, Cuomo refused to label Mamdani an antisemite because “I cannot see into his heart,” but was clear that the 33-year old very much “fuels antisemitism,” and further “engages in hate speech.”

The crowd nodded, murmured. Some thought Cuomo was too polite. They’ve listened to Mamdani excuse phrases like “globalize the Intifada” to bring violence against the Jews everywhere. They saw the only legislation introduced by the radical socialist, a bill to strip the tax-exempt status of charities benefiting Israelis, like Hatzalah. They read his call to “defund the police.”

Mamdani’s platform is a direct threat to Jewish safety.

*Eli Beer, founder of Hatzalah in Israel, asking a question of Andrew Cuomo at the Hamptons Synagogue on July 20, 2025 (photo: First One Through)*

A Plan for the City

Cuomo laid out his blueprint:

Enforce the law and prosecute hate crimes.
Hire 5,000 new police officers.
Build housing in a supply-starved market.
Attract businesses and jobs to the city.

He didn’t let the crowd forget what they lost: 15,000 jobs from Amazon’s Long Island City project—killed, he reminded them, by Mamdani’s comrade-in-ideology, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cuomo said that he had worked hard to win that competition, only to be foiled by a Democratic-Socialist. When the city and state were not blocked by terrible ideologies, Cuomo was able to accomplish a lot, including the Second Avenue subway, a new Laguardia Airport and a replacement to the Tappan Zee Bridge.

He was a Democrat who accomplished tangible results, while the Democratic-Socialist wing of the party impeded any progress with “stupid ideas.”

Desperation and the Wounded Gladiator

When Cuomo finished, the crowd didn’t roar—it exhaled. One person whispered into the microphone that the speech needed to be given in every synagogue in the city. Cuomo responded that he will do what he can but you need to get and be messengers. If you don’t organize, Mamdani wins.

Cuomo offered data: Mamdani won the primary because the activist class under 30 turned out en masse. But the general electorate was different: 70% Democrats, 15% Independents, and 15% Republicans. With Adams or Sliwa out of the race, Cuomo insisted, the math would work and recent polls show he is correct. He could win. If the others dropped out.

The audience, mostly over 70, carried the unease of people who had seen this movie before. Socialist cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago—were crumbling under the weight of their ideology and policies. New York had put its toe in the water in the past with Bill de Blasio and the results were terrible. A Mamdani mayoralty, Cuomo warned, could bury the city for two decades.

They wanted to believe Cuomo could win. But they also saw the crowded field ahead and Cuomo’s primary loss behind. It was like watching a wounded gladiator try to rise as the coliseum gates opened and the lions approached.

They weren’t cheering.
They were praying.

For him. For themselves.

From Vienna to Queens: Karl Lueger, Zohran Mamdani, and the Politics of Polite Antisemitism (June 2025)

Make New York Bankrupt Again: The Danger of Mamdani and 21st Century Socialism (June 2025)

DSA Goes Full Antisemite (July 2024)

Racism In The Old and Antisemitism In The Youth (February 2024)

Please Don’t Vote for a Democratic Socialist (November 2018)

The Blinding Witch Hunt of Minor Offenses

Posted on December 22, 2021 by First.One.Through

There are many signs that society has lost its moorings.

‘Woke’ America makes the argument daily with inanity such as the charge that math is racist and the demand to ‘defund the police’ as if anarchy is a model society. Left-wing activists are similarly trying to change the very meaning of words with new spins that only White people can be racist by definition, and smears that Israel, the most liberal country in the Middle East, is an ‘apartheid‘ state.

Stupidity is not confined to alt-left sensitivities. Society as a whole is outraged by offenses much less grave than serious crimes which are ignored.

Consider The New York Times and its treatment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For years the left-wing paper gave a pass to one of the most repressive regimes in the world which doesn’t allow a woman to drive or leave the home without a male escort. It said nothing about the country’s policy of executing minors or its public beheadings.

In its see/hear/say no evil orientation, The Times sold expensive tourist packages to the country. At least, until the crown price was accused of killing the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Then the media conglomerate found its spine to cancel its lavish junket. Beheading juveniles was deemed a lesser offense than killing a fellow journalist.

It goes on today with American politics as well, like New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo was directly responsible for killing thousands of older New Yorkers during the early months of the COVID pandemic when he ordered coronavirus patients to be sent to nursing homes. Cuomo then directed his staff to lie about the nursing home deaths to make it appear that he was doing a great job handling the crisis. Not a surprise, as he was being paid millions of dollars to write a book about his leadership during the pandemic. The depravity of conceit!

And society cheered this man, until he did something truly unforgivable – he sexually harassed women in his office. Only at that point did society turn on him.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo allegedly placed his hands on Anna Ruch’s cheeks at a wedding party in 2019 and asked if he could kiss her. Cuomo was undone by sexual harassment charges but not for killing thousands of seniors and ordering the cover-up, as he sought millions of dollars for writing a ‘leadership’ book.

A healthy society can easily identify and call out depravity; but we are far from healthy. Even before the pandemic, we let our minds become infected with the adrenaline of righteous rage as we embarked on witch hunts of minor offenses, ignoring the glaring evil before our eyes. Now, trapped in the cycles of closures, our anger buys distrust, so we vilify counter opinions and embrace the tyrants who feed our faiths.

Vaccines and time we will eventually vanquish the coronavirus pandemic, but we must seek a cure for the mental illness which confuses the all-out assault to flatten society’s hierarchy, with blinding rage preventing people from seeing the spectrum between good and evil.

The U.S. is Stealing Real Choices from the Voters

Posted on July 6, 2018 by First.One.Through

The United States of America prides itself on its democracy.

Americans strongly believe that the country gives its citizens the right to choose the course of their lives, much as they can choose to elect a leader of their liking. It is a mantra that President Abraham Lincoln encapsulated in his prayer for at Gettysburg in 1863, about freedom in the USA, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”

Embedded in those words is the notion that ALL people have the ability to serve in the U.S. government for the benefit of ALL Americans.

But remarkably, there are some families that seemingly have a stranglehold on political office. They have names like Bush, Clinton, Kennedy and Cuomo. Brothers, sons, wives and cousins with the same last name show up as presidents, senators, governors and congressmen. Decade after decade.

The notion that any and all Americans have a shot at being a leader in government feels more like a fairy tale than a foundation principle of the country.

And it is rooted in corrupt mechanisms that those people in power use to cement their positions in government.

Governor Andrew Cuomo
and the Women’s Equality Party

Andrew Cuomo is the current Governor of the State of New York. He served as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration from 1997 to 2001 (often accused of creating the foundational mess for the great housing and stock market collapse in 2008-9 due to encouraging banks to provide housing loans to people whom could not afford them) before becoming Attorney General of New York and then Governor.

Not coincidentally, his father Mario Cuomo also served as governor of New York.

But it is not just the famous name, lineage and connections that help cement Andrew Cuomo in power (his brother Chris Cuomo is a famous TV journalist). It is also very much about his gaming the system in his favor.

In 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo – the most powerful Democrat in the State of New York – decided to launch another separate political party. If that sounds too outrageous to be true, you haven’t looked into New York politics.

Noting how many women were voting Democratic, Andrew Cuomo created the Women’s Equality Party. A new party, beyond his Democratic Party, solely focused on women’s issues.

And who did the Women’s Equality Party support for governor? A woman? Of course not. It backed its creator, Andrew Cuomo.

When an average New Yorker went in to the voting booth to elect a governor in 2014, did he or she get to choose from a wide array of candidates? There were many parties listed on the ballot including the Green Party and the Independence Party and the Reform Party…. so many choices beyond the major Democratic and Republican Parties.

But the long list of parties posted a fiction. There was no choice.

Andrew Cuomo was not only listed as a candidate by the Democrats, but by the Working Families Party, the Independence Party, and the Women’s Equality Party. Rob Astorino of the Republican Party also showed up under the Conservative Party and the Stop-the Common-Core Party (now called the Reform Party).

Two individuals showed up seven times to voters!

How impressive these candidates must have been that so many parties endorsed them! And the Women’s Party endorsed Cuomo too! He must be extremely pro-women, even if no voter could recall anything he did for women as the sitting governor. (Of course there was no footnote on the voting form that Cuomo himself created and named this new party to ensnare those single-issue voters).

But the Cuomo machinations were not done.

You see, New York State has some funky rules for getting on the Voter Registration Form. A party must have at least 50,000 votes in the governor contest to appear as an “official party” over the next four years. For Cuomo’s new entity to get staying power, he needed to funnel some of the votes that would normally come to him via the Democratic, Working Families and Independence Parties to come through the Women’s Equality Party to establish it for the next several years.

And wouldn’t you be shocked to learn, that of the over 2 million votes that Cuomo received in 2014, just over 53,000 – barely enough – came from the Women’s Equality Party. Just enough to be on the New York Voter Registration Forms. What a happy coincidence! Wink.

Not only did New Yorkers have few choices for governor despite the multiple parties in the race, they were deceived and manipulated by Cuomo and the New York Board of Elections.

Libertarians – The Invisible Third Party

In the 2014 New York governor contest, the Green Party and Libertarian Party each promoted a distinct candidate not named Cuomo or Astorino. The Green Party candidate won almost 5% of the vote, but the Libertarian candidate only gathered 17,000 votes. Due to New York State rules of needing 50,000 votes to be an “official party,” the Libertarians are now invisible on New York State Voter Registration Forms.

VoterRegistration2015

The Libertarian Party had the third greatest number of votes in the 2016 presidential election. The Libertarians won more votes than all of the minor parties COMBINED.

But if you want to register as a Libertarian in New York, you have to skip over eight other choices and go to the “Other” category and type in “Libertarian.”

Don’t think there’s an impact? Here are the totals of registered voters in New York as of April 2018:

Democrat 6,201,033
Republican 2,823,758
Independent 481,831
Conservative 155,500
Working Families 46,453
Green 29,787
Other 7,329 (including Libertarian)
Women’s Equality 4,675

So how does the Women’s Equality Party get 53,000 votes when fewer than 5,000 people are registered with the party? Well there are over 2.6 million people that didn’t affiliate with any party. And of course, there’s Cuomo’s influence that helped make it happen.

It would have been so much easier to just be a politician from royalty and cook up your own political party…

The Majors at the Margins
and the Minors at the Edges

Voters are increasingly disillusioned by the Democratic and Republican Parties, which have become more and more extreme as they fight to appeal to the excited base at the margins through their respective primaries. As of 2017, Liberals accounted for 48% of the Democratic Party, dwarfing the middle of the road Conservative Democrats which are down to just 15% of the party (and shrinking). The Republicans’ situation is not better. To review the Republicans on the Judicial Committee which approves judges, is to look at a cast of characters that are all almost exclusively Conservative purists (only three of eleven members had a GovTracks rating of under 0.85 – Chuck Grassley; Lindsay Graham; and Ben Sasse).

Meanwhile the small niche single-issue parties like the Green Party continue on their extremist ways. They either push an extremist candidate like Jill Stein (Green Party), or endorse the Democrat or Republican candidate, to stay relevant and on the voter registration forms. Ideological purists on one hand, or tools of the establishment and election committees on the other.

The dynamic has led to a false array of choices which have become more extreme, and single issue marginal candidates. You can either binge watch Law & Order on Netflix or three different cable channels OR you can watch SproutTV and wait for the cable channels to drop it from the visible universe.

Needed Overhaul

It is time to dramatically overhaul our election system to bring genuine mainstream choices back to voters.

Any political party that wins at least 2.5% of the votes in the last presidential election should be on every state’s voter registration form
If a political party does not field a distinct candidate from the other parties for two consecutive election cycles, it gets removed from the state’s voter registration form
If a political party does not field a distinct candidate from the other parties for three consecutive election cycles, it does not appear on the election form
The threshold of reaching the voter registration form should be 1.0% of the gubernatorial election, not 50,000 (in New York). An absolute number is unfair, especially if few voters turn out, and it should become a standard for all states.
Any candidate from any party that calls for violence against a U.S. citizen must be removed from the ballot. It is time to bring back the most basic level of civility.

The founding fathers of the United States imagined a country based on the principles of freedom and liberty and feared the abuse of power and the coercive nature of people who played games with election process, money and judges. President James Madison may have had Andrew Cuomo (and his family, appointees and political parties) in mind when he said:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Americans are being robbed of quality moderate choices for leadership positions, and the runaway train seems to be just gathering steam.

Related First.One.Through articles:

Naked Democracy

Let’s Make America VOTE Again

Libertarian Validation and Absolution

In The Margins

In Defense of Foundation Principles

Losing Rights

A Country Divided

“Coastal Liberal Latte-sipping Politically-correct Out-of-touch Folks.”

Is Calling Someone a ‘Nazi’ Simply a ‘Poor Choice of Words?’ Ask a Westchester Democrat

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