Tea and Vitriol

  The name "Daniel Prude" should not be unknown to anyone between the ages of eight and eighty who has lived in the dying City of Rochester for the last two and a half years. He was the out of towner who came to visit his brother, Joe Prude, at the end of March 2020. Within 24 hours of his arrival, he was subjected to a mental hygiene arrest, released, able to purchase illegal drugs (how he knew where to find them when he had just arrived in town is anyone's guess), ran naked into the streets on a cold night, was subdued by officers of the Rochester Police Department and died in their custody. Prude's death led to a cover-up by ex-Mayor Lovely Warren, her then police chief LaRon Singletary and a host of other members of her administration as well as the silence of City Counselor Mary Lupien, who later claimed that she had kept silent for the sake of Prude's family. When the information became public in September 2020, Free the People ROC organized riots, demanded

 City Councilman Jose Peo ( NW district) hosts a regular podcast on We the People Podcast Network, "Politically Correcting With Jose Peo." It features Peo himself with a co-host and guests guzzling beer and making off color remarks, sort of like pubescent adolescent boys pretending to sound like men after they discovered their daddy's liquor stash. However, the episode aired on June 15 featured a segment of unbelievable vulgarity, crudeness and political incorectness that was not to be expected from a sitting elected official and his buddies. At least not in public. Less surprising is that most people didn't know anything about it until City Newspaper's Gino Fanelli posted his story about it on June 27, almost two weeks after the podcast, probably because most people don't pay attention to what little Peo says anyway and couldn't be bothered to listen to his podcast. If they even knew he had one. Frankly, it became a tempest in a teapot. I listened to the

The old saying goes: "Be careful what you wish for. You might get it." In 2021, a large percentage of voters wanted to remove Lovely Warren from the mayoral throne and were not particularly fussy about the character of the person who would succeed her. They got their wish and elected Malik (Mahweak) Evans as mayor. Despite the media blitz to create a positive persona in order to sell the public on Mahweak, it never really took off because the reality of his political history was pretty dismal and too many people knew it to be taken in by all of the hype that now surrounded him. Still, enough people came to believe that their "creation" had the answers to all of their questions and the solutions to Rochester's serious problem of crime, poverty and a failing school system. Only it soon became evident that Evans really had no solutions to anything, which quickly produced a sense of "buyers' remorse" among people who were once his cheerleaders. My only

It is a week into the year 2022. And really, nothing seems to have changed. If anything, the new mayoral regime seems like an insipid rehash of previous administrations, especially the last one. When Malik Evans took his oath of office at 12:01 AM, January 1 in his home among his family, the news media covered it. It was cute and folksy, especially with his children asking everyone to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. More about that momentarily. But it was a replay of Mayor Warren taking her oath in the presence of her dying, comatose grandfather, holding his hand, faithfully recorded by her soon to be communications czarina. Both events were designed to elicit sympathy for the new mayors, a publicity stunt. And families make for excellent political accessories, props for the media, don't they? Evans's official swearing in, in the morning, was held virtually because of COVID. That is the reason it was so short. There was no entertainment to glorify the incoming regime. But he d