Local Republicans take steps toward violence
Stefanik's crew probably wrote 'Di Manno' letter
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The usual excuse for the lying, bullying and vandalism of the Trump forces is “both sides do it,” but that, too, is a lie.
Republicans are responsible for Jan. 6. What brutal attack on the seat of the U.S. government was undertaken by Democrats?
Locally, you hear the same justification for the theft and destruction of political signs and flags, but locally, too, the criminality is mostly on the Republicans’ side.
“It seems as though the majority have been reported from Democratic candidates,” said Warren County Sheriff Jim LaFarr, about the numerous thefts of political signs this election season.
Scattered sign thefts occur every election, but this year has been worse, according to LaFarr and to Lynn Boecher, chairwoman of the Warren County Democratic Committee.
It got so bad, with more than 240 signs stolen, worth more than $2,400, that committee members started putting Apple Air Tags on signs. Then four of them — three Harris/Walz signs and one “Yes on Prop. 1” sign — disappeared and were tracked by the Warren County Sheriff’s Department to a business in Kingsbury, Bergman Custom Casework.
I spoke on Friday with William Bergman.
“I travel on Haviland Road every day,” he said. “I saw these signs on the side of the road. I’m a Trump supporter, I put signs on Haviland Road. I’ve had a lot removed.
“I saw these other signs. They were in the ditch. I wasn’t the one who pulled those signs out. I had 50 or so Trump signs we placed around the area — three or four are left standing.”
He has not reported the theft of his own signs, he said. Bergman puts his signs along public roadways, like Haviland Road, not in his yard, he said, while the four tagged signs that were taken were originally placed on private property in a family’s yard.
He regrets picking up the signs from where he said he found them (in a ditch).
“I should have left them right there,” he said.
He does not condone the taking of other people’s signs, he said.
“No, not at all,” he said. “It’s free speech. There’s two sides. They should all be left alone. It’s a microcosm of what’s happening in the country.”
Kimberly Bullard, a Democrat running against Republican Scott Gushlaw in Queensbury’s Ward 2 to replace Harrison Freer on the Town Board (Mr. Freer died on July 31), said she has lost “probably close to 100” signs to theft.
Ward 2 stretches from the Broadacres neighborhood on the Glens Falls border up to the airport, and the farther north you go, the more her signs, which she buys for $13 each from West Signs in Hudson Falls, are being stolen, she said.
Bullard, 53, is a real estate agent who serves as an alternate on the town Planning Board and sits on the local Democratic Committee. This race is her first foray into electoral politics.
She loves seeing that people have chosen to put her signs on their lawn, she said. But she’s not sure they’re worth the investment, if they’re going to be stolen.
As she has canvassed for votes, she has been appalled by other signs Trump supporters have put out, such as, “Tim and the Hoe Gotta Go.”
“I don’t know what to say to that,” she said.
I don’t know either, except the vulgarity on the signs is a reflection of the vulgar man at the top of the ticket.
Vandal in the night
Last week, Enid Mastrianni posted on Facebook a photo of herself, her friend Neal Herr and her boyfriend, Hui Cox, standing by her house on Notre Dame Street in Glens Falls, next to the Kamala 2024 flag she had just put up on a column near her front door.
That same night, she said, someone wearing a hoodie and a facemask walked up to her house and tore the flag from its pole. Cox had set up a camera along with the flag, because they suspected someone would vandalize it.
Here’s a photo of the vandal:
I don’t know Mastrianni, but I learned quite a lot about her during a phone call. She has brain cancer, for example, and a good sense of humor.
She had surgery in July, she said.
“Was it successful?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s terminal. I’m gonna die of it, if I don’t get hit by a truck first.”
I laughed, then apologized for laughing.
“That’s OK,” she said. “The thing with cancer is, you’ve gotta keep your sense of tumor.”
I laughed again. She saves that joke for the biggest-deal, most serious doctors she sees, she said — “the neuro-oncologist surgeons.”
Cox is also ill. He suffered kidney failure recently and underwent dialysis.
The point is that Mastrianni and Cox are human beings.
When political antagonism crosses into attacks on personal property, the social order begins to break down. The next step is attacks on the people who put up the signs and the flags.
Weird letter
On Wednesday (Oct. 30), Congresswoman Elise Stefanik posted on X a photo of a letter, which begins “Dear Glens Falls Area Small Businesses” and ends with a typed signature — “Jerry Di Manno.”
Stefanik says this is a letter that was sent out to local business owners to fool them into thinking Di Manno, the owner of Poopie’s restaurant, considers Stefanik a “moron” who is “always wrong.”
I think the letter itself is a phony — or a phony phony, if you will, written not by a Stefanik opponent but by one of her own crew.
Read it. It feels purposely stupid and annoying.
If this letter was meant to convince people that it was written by Di Manno, a famously outspoken supporter of Trump and Stefanik, it was an incompetent attempt at a dirty trick.
If it’s a fake fake letter, it’s an elaborate ploy — and why bother when she is almost certain to win? — but the Stefanik campaign team is known for this sort of trick.
They’ve arranged in the past for letters to be sent to the Post-Star with phony local addresses; and for a young man they were paying to pretend to be a supporter of her opponent, Tedra Cobb, so he could attend a meeting of a youth group with Cobb and surreptitiously record it.
A few years ago, when I was at the Post-Star and checking letters to the editor, I discovered that young teens from Saratoga County had been recruited by the Stefanik crew and coached to write pro-Stefanik letters to local papers on subjects, such as international trade, that the teens knew nothing about. Since letters to the editor do not include writers’ ages, readers would assume they were written by people who cared about these issues and were old enough to vote.
Stefanik’s team got defensive about my checks and said I was “harassing minors,” because I called the teens who signed the letters
If they would go to all that trouble for a few letters to the editor, they would try this complicated, unnecessary scheme, too.
Message in the forest
Lovely leaves
“The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.” - Arthur C. Neilson
Let’s move forward, into the light.
Oh COME ON!!! Stefanik (DeGrasse) tried that DiManno letter sham last election cycle. I would call that a "recycled October Bombshell". They even appeared on WNYT Evening News (and possibly others). I assumed then that the whole thing was done with the alleged letter writer's pre-approval because I'm pretty sure that he would have "hit the roof" if it had been a real effort to use his name, and he would have doggedly pursued the culprit. Lying is what they do best. Heck, I think it may be the only thing that they do... that and calling almost half of her constituents nasty, derogatory names.