Opinion: Governing by Tweet, by George Fiala

Not much space to write this month, but that’s fine. I was actually going to write about how much of news gathering, as well as politicking, is done not in person anymore, but via Twitter and other non-social media thingies. So this can be like an expanded tweet.

I’m not sure if Red Hook yet knows this, but for the past couple years we have been represented in the State government not by Velmanette Montgomery and Felix Ortiz, who used to hang in the neighborhood occasionally, but even more, employed very visible representatives to do the local things that local politicians used to do, but by two people named Marcella Mitaynes and Jabari Brisport.

Maybe it’s just me, the publisher of a local paper, that never hears from them, and local newspapers are passe in this day and age, and why should they care about us anyway.

I did get all excited last month when I saw the community board advertise a meeting on last mile warehouses led by Jabari. This would be my chance to see what he knows about local issues,  but when I finally got to see it on Zoom, it turned out he only spoke for about a minute of a two hour meeting, mostly to say how nice it was that some people in the neighborhood were against warehouses.

What little I do know about these two legislators is mostly from their Twitter accounts.

They are both members of the what I consider the cultish Democratic Socialists of America, whose goal it seems is to slowly take over local government, rather than to actually govern.  Or else you could say that the governing they do is by tweeting platitudes.

A great majority of the other kind of tweets that I see are supportive of other DSA candidates and legislators, as well as raising funds for their DSA.

It kind of reminds me, an old timer, of AMWAY and their multi-level marketing strategy. If you’ve never heard of them, you can google it.