H.L. Mencken is famous for his saying, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." That's sure as all get-out what New York is undergoing right now; a majority put an actual communist in the Mayor's residence, and now all kinds of lunacy are taking over the Big Apple.
The latest head-scratcher is actually nuts: Mayor Mamdani's new "health czar" was once involved in an effort to register mental patients to vote.
Mamdani selected Alister Martin on Jan. 31 to lead the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Martin, a former emergency room doctor, launched Vot-ER in 2019, a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic. The group creates materials for doctors to register their patients to vote in clinical settings. One of its earlier partners, the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, is an inpatient clinic for people with psychotic disorders.
Citing the "therapeutic" benefits of voting, the institute has used Vot-ER’s tools since at least 2021 to register patients hospitalized for schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts, and life-threatening addictions. Some of those patients had been involuntarily committed, raising thorny questions about informed consent and the use of vulnerable people as political pawns.
Are there therapeutic benefits of voting? Well, encouraging voter registration of people who are, to put it bluntly, nuts, well, the benefits of that to the general public are bound to be negative. As noted, these are schizophrenics, people on suicide watch, people with addiction issues - people who have already been captured by the guys in white jackets wielding big butterfly nets, and have since been involuntarily committed.
Why on earth should we be encouraging the franchise? We don't have to discourage it, mind; but why push it?
Well, I can think of one reason: Being about half a bubble off plumb already, they are likely to vote for Democrats.
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Then again, Mayor Mamdani's cabinet is an odd one, and it turns out that Alister Martin isn't the only one with questionable notions. The founder of something called "Hot Girls for Mamdani" is neither hot nor a girl, but he is a vocal Hamas supporter.
The founder of ‘Hot Girls for Zohran” is a Muslim man. And he doesn’t like Israel or Jews. But he does like Hamas.
(Gaif) Gilani has also repeatedly authored or promoted tweets sympathetic to or supportive of Hamas, in March 2024 sharing a post claiming that the bargaining table position of the terrorist organization — which rejects Israel’s existence and which initiated the latest wave of the conflict with its rampage into Israeli territory on Oct. 7, 2023 — is “we want lasting peace and our basic human rights.”
He also retweeted a clip of former Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by Israeli forces in October 2024 after he masterminded the previous year’s attacks, with a caption that read, “Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we are getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise?”
Then again, a majority of New Yorkers voted to put Zohran Mamdani in office. What could be crazier than that?
These kinds of stories are enough to make one glad to live in a place that's about as far from the Big Apple as one can get and remain in the United States. New York City, it seems, is in for some interesting times - and I mean "interesting" in the "ancient Chinese curse" sense.
Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.
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