Here, in two snapshots, is the difference between Nate McMurray getting his way vs. Nate McMurray not getting his way. It is an illustration of how Nate McMurray behaves when he is soliciting help for his campaign (March 2018) vs. Nate McMurray being his nasty, dishonorable, toxic self (right now).
Wow! What a great guy and a super team player! Oh, wait – that was March 2018. Here’s how it’s going in March 2024:
Every time Nate loses an election, his would-be constituents dodge a bullet with a Trump-sized ego.
He is as condescending as Trump. He thinks himself so much better than everyone else, like Trump. Despite having only served as supervisor of a rich island suburb, he now denigrates people who want to be “dog catcher” in Cheektowaga or a committeeperson from an inner city ED as “district leader of porto-potties.” I have never seen levels of This guy is as attention-seeking as Trump and plays the victim like Trump. Like Trump, he hurls nasty epithets and insults at people he doesn’t like. He is a phony like Trump – kiss his ass, he’ll talk you up. Ignore him, and the narcissistic rage seeks limp retribution – like threatening to assault someone with cake on their birthday at a fundraiser no one wants him to attend.
What are we – on failed race number 5? (Three times for Congress, (or is it two?), once for CE, once for the Congressional special, and now the Congressional general? Someday, he’ll give up and go back to trying to keep a regular job.
Two of the myriad asylum seekers now being temporarily housed in Erie County have now been arrested for committing sexual assault or rape. These are obviously heinous crimes that should – and are – being prosecuted with vigor.
But it is not their status as “migrants” or “asylum seekers” or “refugees” that caused the predation. Immigrants do not hold a monopoly on sex crimes, nor are sex crimes any more or less heinous depending on the alleged perpetrator’s visa status.
For Republican candidate for County Executive Chrissy Casilio to roll a podium into the parking lot of a hotel housing refugees in order to heap scorn and derision on Mark Poloncarz over a migrant’s crimes is interesting. Is it the crime that is bad? Because if rape is bad, then should she not be holding a press conference outside every rape location? Or is rape only bad – or especially bad – when the alleged perpetrator is a refugee from Venezuela or the Congo? I mean, it’s bad in all cases, so either every case deserves this sort of attention or it does not.
What all of this really underscores is that the Republicans have literally nothing to run on. They are not a political party with a platform or a set even of shared ideals – they are a ragtag collection of MAGA cult adherents who lurch from culture war item to culture war item and dig in especially deeply when it has to do with minorities or immigrants who are not white.
Chrissy CaBoom is more familiar with making pronouncements on Facebook or at Clarence Republican Committee meetings, safely ensconced in the town where her father is Supervisor and their surname carries a lot of weight. Elsewhere, it’s all coming across a bit tired. With nothing really to run on, she’s taking advice from trolling idiots and going after Mark Poloncarz for two migrants who committed a crime for which CaBoom’s hero Donald Trump himself has already been found liable. So on the one hand CaBoom and her party slavishly pledge fealty to a sex predator and on the other hand somehow think they possess a moral high ground enabling them to criticize the sex predation from someone else because they’re seeking asylum, as if that person isn’t then duly prosecuted and, if guilty, deported.
Every anti-immigrant (R) weasel with a Polish or Italian surname should be routinely called out for especial ridicule.
VSP Graphics in West Seneca is thriving “DESPITE government, not because of it.”
Looks like a great company doing neat things!
It also received $450,000 in free money from the federal government to subsidize its operations and keep staff on hand during Covid. So, while I’m sure it is thriving for a variety of reasons, it is false to suggest that it has not also benefitted from public largesse, and it is foolish for a campaign to make such an allegation without literally checking its work first.
It’s funny because when this type of money is being given to poor people or people overladen with usurious student debt, Casilio and her supporters would call this socialism.
And this socialist scheme was to save and maintain around 20 jobs.
In 15 years on Twitter I never once wrote or shared a syllable I didn’t believe – or believe in – so as to “provoke” people or to “grow the algorithm,” whatever that means.
As an experienced public relations executive, Chrissy Casilio – the daughter of an elected official, a Republican committeeman, a spokesperson for other political candidates, and someone who has been very active in civic life in Clarence – is well aware of the fact that her past statements and positions are going to be scrutinized, especially because she is a newcomer to politics. No one has any idea who she is, what she has accomplished, or what she stands for. She is a political blank slate.
It’s not like anyone can go back and second-guess any decision she has ever made, because none exist out in the public.
Well, except her decision to lock down, attempt to sanitize, and then simply to delete her Twitter account.
Why is this still a thing? Because Casilio spent her time on Twitter engaging in stupidity. In horrible conspiracy theories. In shitposting. She dabbled in this on Facebook a bit, which is why I unfriended her there. I am not aware of having followed her Twitter, but really how many wackadoodle right-wing conspiracy accounts does one need to follow? One is too many.
“My view of social media, especially on Twitter, was to kind of provoke conversation and influence the algorithm,” Casilio said. “As a marketing PR person, I know how that algorithm works on Twitter. Whether I believe in a topic or not, I try to comment about it to get reaction, get likes, get comments.”
Conservatives legitimately think they can go out there to “provoke conversation,” which is a handy euphemism for “troll others,” and then complain about being blocked or “shadowbanned.” She thinks she is going to “influence the algorithm” by proclaiming silly things to her 250 followers, and that this provocative trolling will be promoted by “the algorithm” to more eyeballs.
“There were people questioning what was going on,” Casilio told The News when asked about the tweet. “I obviously said things that I regret. I wasn’t implying anything.”
How stupid do you think voters are? You weren’t “implying anything?” Good God, if no implication exist, then what is the purpose of the Tweet – what was “going on” that “people” were “questioning?” Hm? This is just another pathetic entry in the “Covid vaccines cause clots/strokes/heart attacks” meme that is running rampant in right-wing circles. Your base loves that shit, Chrissy – embrace it! The normies? Mm, maybe not so much.
It’s all fun and games when you’re doing it for the lolz or the “algorithm,” and it’s different when you’re running for office and you know a majority of the electorate isn’t in the Proud Boys or watching Newsmax.
What she is saying, frankly, is that being a combative weirdo on Twitter is good self-promotion. Well, if that’s true, she really needs self-promotion now that she’s running for office, so shuttering her “CaBoom” account seems counterintuitive.
The WNYmedia.net article also referenced a debunked conspiracy theory about the online furniture company Wayfair allegedly being involved in child sex trafficking.
The conspiracy theory, which police said was false, alleged that the company was involved in sex trafficking in part because the names of some of its products matched the names of missing children.
“If there is no truth…why did they pull the items down?” Casilio tweeted in 2020.
Casilio also wrote the “100 percent” emoji symbol – which signifies agreement – below a tweet by another Twitter user that stated, “There are not 2 parties. There is ONE Globalist Party with a few honorable Americans on the fringe.” The tweet stated that the country’s politicians “destroyed Trump for exposing the swamp, and created a pandemic and rigged an election to do it,” according to the Investigative Post article.
Casilio told The News she did not share those beliefs. She said she was “not going to let Mark Poloncarz and his cronies try to diminish me to these tweets, because it’s a distraction from the disaster that they’ve created.”
So, she didn’t believe that Wayfair was sex trafficking, but she happily fed that idiotic rumor. She approvingly shares ridiculous conspiratorial nonsense, but now when caught says she doesn’t believe them and it’s all Poloncarz’s fault.
“I honestly couldn’t explain to you what a globalist party even is,” Casilio said. “Everyone has things they probably have regretted on social media, especially if they have never been a candidate. That’s just the world we live in for 2023.”
But Ms. Casilio can only be “diminished…to these tweets” because it’s all we have. The sum total of what we know about her opinion about things is thanks to her social media, and it is replete with things that swing between “vile” and “stupid.” Why did she agree – using the red “100” emoji – to a conspiracy theory about a globalist party that she cannot even begin to attempt to explain?
“I have tweeted and said things to provoke, to get reaction, to grow the algorithm. I would poke because that’s what you do.”
What a sad endeavor – to Tweet things to get negative attention so that you can grow an audience and harvest even more negative attention. Most of us dropped that in middle school.
When I tweeted, I knew things I would say would get negative attention from some people, but that goes with the territory. I never purposely wrote things I didn’t comprehend or did not fully believe for the sole purpose of provoking a reaction in people. What a waste of time and effort that would be, to shitpost for the algorithm.
Casilio said she deleted the tweets because she “didn’t want it to be a distraction from the topics at hand.”
No, she deleted the tweets because whatever was there was dumb and shameful and would come back to haunt her repeatedly right up until November. Again – the electorate is not so stupid. Now, their deletion will haunt her until November.
Her efforts to deflect accountability for it and blame her enemies is weak, and her ongoing sanitization of her social media footprint is weaker still. If it was important enough for you to say to your 250 followers when you weren’t running for office, it’s even more important now that you are for a few hundred thousand prospective voters.
Deborah Silverman, the chair of the communication department at SUNY Buffalo State who has been teaching public relations for 20 years, said she was upset reading Casilio’s comments about her field. Silverman also is a former chair of the Public Relations Society of America Board of Ethics and Professional Standards, which advocates for honesty and accuracy.
That’s pretty damning.
You are there to build trust with people and you have to stand by what you say in public. If I were advising her as a public relations professional advising a candidate, I would never advise that person to behave in that manner. Never.”
“You don’t ever go on out in public in any social media or traditional news media, unless what you are saying is what you truly believe. And her comments made no sense to me,” Silverman said. “If I were running for public office, I would never say those things. It is all about trust.”
This is the biggest mystery of all – Casilio claims she doesn’t believe this crazy stuff she posted, so why use your public persona to come across as nuts?
You can tweet whatever you want but if it’s crazy and you’re running for office, voters deserve to know.
People who aren’t funny and have no sense of humor shouldn’t attempt humor.
People who are transparently nursing and prosecuting grievances – and won’t shut up about them – should not simultaneously pretend that they are acting out of a sense of civic duty. This is insulting the intelligence of literally anyone.
People shouldn’t lie over and over and over again in order to nurse grudges and salve wounded egos.
People who secretly record others for political gain should release the entire audio and not selectively edited snippets from it. That’s how we know you’re lying and spinning.
People for whom party bosses cleared the field to advance their candidacies shouldn’t pretend like they’re some sort of grassroots hero who has bucked the system.
People who run into the harsh and stark realization that they have burned every bridge and alienated hard-working party faithful should look only in the mirror when assigning blame.
The people deserve to see what the Republican candidate for County Executive believes and what she was tweeting to people. This is a deliberate cover-up to hide this information from voters, and it is unconscionable.
On Thursday and Friday February 16th and 17th, Cheektowaga Councilman Brian Nowak interacted with County Executive candidate Nate McMurray.
The difference here is that Brian is an elected official and very well-informed. He knows what he’s talking about.
Nate isn’t and doesn’t.
Yet that doesn’t prevent Nate from being condescending to Brian in an absurd way. (click the image to enlarge)
Chances are slim that McMurray makes it past petitions to merit even a response from Poloncarz on a “debate”, but look at how he interacts with Brian, who points out that ego should take a back seat to achievement and defending past achievements. Nate has a lot of the former, few of the latter. But he is to be lauded for rendering himself unemployable except for a shaky entry into being a litigation attorney.
He immediately lunges at Nowak, making him out to be a Poloncarz shill by quizzing him on three bullet points on which he has fixated. Nowak responds, deftly. (Again, click to expand)
So, in response to Nowak, McMurray lashes out with feigned incredulity and then proceeds to insult Nowak, who responds by reminding McMurray that it is he who is running for CE, and again schooling him on the fact that governing involves myriad competing interests and associated minutiae.
Then Nate pivots to his love of IKEA (born from his Scandinavian travel, despite the fact that IKEA exists on every populated continent on Earth.) It is another McMurray flex – he’s better than you because he made more than you – is better traveled than you.
Nowak then reminds McMurray that the 14% poverty rate in Erie County is not caused by – or fixable by – one man. (Remember the other day I referred to McMurray’s declarations about poverty to be akin to Trumpism’s “he alone can fix it.“)
McMurray then again offers a non-responsive insult by claiming we have the “worst job market in the country” (citation, please), and that Buffalo “is the third poorest city in the country,” which really should be directed to the city’s government.
Then he asks, rhetorically, as if this is Nowak’s responsibility to answer, “what is the legacy of [Poloncarz]”? I personally think the legacy is to restore faith in county government. To deliver excellent results with a renewed focus on what matters to people. To be a responsible and capable steward of the public purse. To navigate through two negotiations with the Bills and a pandemic. To restore Erie County to fiscal responsibility, improve our credit rating, improve our infrastructure, and to ensure that county departments and services are constantly improving.
Anyone who thinks there hasn’t been positive change between 2012 – 2023, as compared with 2000 – 2011 is lying, an idiot, or was simply absent from the area. Anyone with even a passing, hearsay recollection of Mssrs. Giambra and Collins know how much better, more competent, more responsive, and more people-focused our county government is now.
That’s why we don’t necessarily need some quasi-informed cowboy spouting off about undefined “change” because that sounds a lot like 1999 speaking. “Challenging authority” is for loudmouth adolescents, and is not a positive for its own sake. It really underscores the fact that the driving force that informs McMurray’s candidacy is score-settling and grievance. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the nuts and bolts of running a county government.
As Nowak, notes, “Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.” *Chef’s kiss.*
…if two individuals in the same tax jurisdiction live in properties with the same values, they pay the same amount of property tax, regardless of their incomes.
Anyhow, Nate here used to be the supervisor of a small town, so he knows how this works – yet again, he’s assuming you don’t and that you’re dumb and gullible. The county, after all, does not set the assessments – the towns do. The county merely sets the rate, which has gone down continuously as property values appreciated.
And those taxes pay for all of the things that County Executives actually oversee, as opposed to international rail and state projects.
Caveat: I am a member of the BECPL Library Board.
The County Executive – the County – doesn’t run the Library system. They help to fund the library, but they don’t get involved in day-to-day operations.
As for the disruptions, those were a topic for discussion at yesterday’s meeting and the administration is dealing with that situation, which is far too complex than some tweeter calling the libraries “places of violence and disrepair” in order to politicize something apolitical.
Finally, Nate keeps saying Buffalo has the “worst job market in the country.”
I would love to see a citation to that purported fact. Maybe it’s just “vibes.”
The only change Nate McMurray would bring is a return to fiscal irresponsibility, relentless politicization of apolitical things, settling of scores, endless grievance, and a lot of time wasted on stuff that has nothing to do with running a county.
I mean, these things write themselves. Build a domed stadium – which would cost more than the complained-off $1BN – to be ready for “NEXT”, which is evidently “e-gaming.”
Let’s start out with a prediction: the likelihood of the Erie County Democratic Committee’s Executive Committee endorsing Nate McMurray over Mark Poloncarz for County Executive is nil. Null set. Zero. Zilch. Naught.Nate garnered a lot of Democratic support and money through his three-time losing streak for Congress, because he was going against Republicans. Now, he has quixotic scores to settle, so he is positioning himself falsely as some sort of youthful change agent who will shake up the status quo. Yet, so far all he’s really said is that Mark Poloncarz caused the Tops massacre, there should be a fast train to Toronto, the absence of a Nike Store is indicative of Buffalo’s decline, and when it comes to poverty, he alone can fix it.
But Nate is no outsider. He is the ultimate insider, who has since merely fallen out with everyone because he has a gargantuan ego and zero people skills.
Don’t believe me? Let’s go back to February 2018, before Nate’s first run for Congress, when he was still the Rus Thompson-backed supervisor of Grand Island. There was a very strong candidate running for that seat – Army veteran and former Erie County prosecutor Sean Bunny. Nate expressed an interest in running, and the party bosses decided that he was the best shot at winning, so they quite literally cleared the field for Nate, forcing everyone else out of the race, including Bunny, who has regrettably not sought elected office since.
When forced to exit the race in 2018, Bunny was diplomatic and expressed above all an unwillingness to do harm to the Democratic Party in a bruising primary battle against McMurray.
“While I am proud of the campaign I ran, I did not become a candidate to hurt the Democratic Party or hurt our chances in November,” he added. “The most important objective is defeating Chris Collins and his anti-Western New York agenda this fall.”
Bunny would not say if he will support another candidate and would not comment when asked if he was satisfied with the party process that is coalescing around McMurray.
That’s what public service is about – putting others before one’s own self-interest.
Nowadays, McMurray will scream bloody murder about Jeremy Zellner to everyone who will bother to listen. But back then?
Zellner acknowledged that he and seven other Democratic chairmen endorsed McMurray to avoid what could prove a divisive primary.
Nate took to Twitter again on Valentine’s Day eve to pen a weird sort of love note to the people whom he purports to be wooing for an endorsement.
“After much effort” is defined as, two emails – one on February 13th and another the next evening. I hope he’s ok from the strain.
Here, he accuses the party boss of excluding the guy no one knew was running until he Tweeted about it. Evidently, everyone is supposed to either read his mind or closely follow his Tweets. McMurray’s candidacy is based on the premise that ECDC Executive Committee members, representing the county party organization’s rank & file, will jettison one of the strongest, smartest elected officials we have for a three-time loser who is quite obviously just settling scores and feeding his ego.
The pretense – really, the slur – here is that the Executive Committee members are seat-warmers who reflexively do Zellner’s bidding, but the “independent” party chairs really want Nate in there. Maybe one or two, but this is another gaslighting, making the gullible believe that the Executive Committee would really pick Nate if only they had the freedom to do so.
Of course you were going to do a press conference. There is no shortage of performative victimhood in the dwindling McMurray camp. The phony tough guy bravado is so laughably contrived, and there’s really nothing to discuss or debate – Nate McMurray has absented himself from the Democratic Party and its committee(s). He lost to Jacobs in November 2021. The last donation that the state system has from McMurray was $200 to India Walton in August 2021.
He didn’t help Kim Beaty. He didn’t help Kevin Hardwick. He didn’t help Randy Hoak. He didn’t help any town committees. If you don’t support Democrats when no one’s looking, how can you presume to demand Democrats’ support now? But he’ll make it about personalities and individual beefs he has, and pretend they’re contrived.
Witness the sheer immensity of the egotism here.
The interview is not for him to do anything else but explain to the people gathered why they should get rid of Poloncarz in favor of McMurray. It really is that simple – it’s not really his place to ask questions, but to answer them. The ECDC Executive Committee is not made up of shrinking violets, and I suspect they’ll be the ones doing the interviewing. The same goes for any local committee that may entertain him.
Fundamentally, he does not understand that the purpose of going before the Executive Committee is to ask them to do something for you. He thinks he has already deserved it, and anyone who says differently is a paid shill.
He “believes in reason” and that’s why he’s going to tell the party bigshots to tell Poloncarz to pound salt in favor of three-time-loser McMurray. Why? For “change.”
Nate does not have the self-awareness to grasp why that room will be “tough.” He will overtly insult the committee members by accusing them of being in Zellner’s / Poloncarz’s pocket without once considering that they actually like and support Mark.
So, what is it about the “direction” of the party “or the city and county” with which you “don’t agree”? Is it that – that they like Mark more than you? That they trust Mark more than you? That their committees have all helped by Mark and vice-versa?
Is it the fact that they won’t do your bidding? Because I think it’s the fact that they won’t do your bidding.
Is it the fact that they have exhausted their patience for you? Because I think it’s the fact that they’ve exhausted their patience for you.
And this is how McMurray sees himself:
The problem with this analogy is that Collins was decidedly unpopular. He played dirty politics throughout his tenure, he defunded culturals and went to war with them. He was an egocentric mini-dictator who had no time for debate or dissent. It was all about the amassing of power, electorate be damned.
Mark Poloncarz came in and sold to the electorate the idea that they and their quality of life mattered.
