Update and scripts

Hello, patrons! I'm in the home stretch. The big project is written, recorded, and mostly edited. It looks like it will be about two hours long. My hope is that it will be ready around the end of the month. Worst case scenario, really early next month. In other words, soon. It's really coming soon.

I want to thank everyone for being patient. My Patreon is "per video" which means I do not get paid if I don't have a new video. Last month was rough for me financially. Everything will be back to normal soon. Looking at about two videos per month starting in May. I have lots of projects waiting to be made, and I think you are going to like them.

With that aside, here are some scripts from last year's episodes.

BIDEN BURGERS

AUDIO 1

At the beginning of the Joe Biden administration, the United States re-entered the Paris Climate Accord. Under the accord, nations agreed to limit emissions to reduce global warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to average global temperatures before the 19thcentury, a benchmark based on rising temperatures due to the Industrial Revolution. The agreement also has a secondary target of limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. To meet that goal, every nation signed to the accord is required to act, but every nation gets to set their own target. Last month, at the Earth Day summit, President Joe Biden announced his administration's plan to cut the United States' greenhouse emissions by 50% by the year 2030. The US is the second greatest contributor to climate change, behind only China. Any action on climate change at all was a welcome change of pace after the previous administration backed out of the Paris Climate Accord altogether. The administration's plan includes $174 billion for electric vehicles and charging stations to help shift consumers away from gas vehicles, $100 billion to update the electric grid to prevent catastrophes like the Texas blackout, $10 billion for a Civilian Climate Corps to restore land, and more. Biden is including this climate change action as part of a larger American Jobs Plan, selling it to the people based on the jobs it will presumably create instead of the goal of combating an existential threat to the planet. While the plan is a step in the right direction, it is actually a fairly small step.

Experts are already sounding the alarm that this will not be enough to combat climate change and that the real goal for 2030 should be closer to 70%. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the US will stay true to this commitment or see it through all the way to 2030. The previous goal made under President Barack Obama was aimed at 2025. If the US had met its previous commitment, it would be on track to reduce emissions by only 38% by 2030, but it is not. Worse still, the idea that this will inspire other nations to take action may be a fantasy. Remember, the Paris Climate Accord allows each nation to set their climate change goal however they choose, and even if they take a cue from the United States, they, too, will only pass half measures such as this. Worst of all, there is no reason to expect other nations to take the lead. Most nations missed the 2020 United Nations deadline to strengthen their 2030 climate goals.The Biden's administration'sclimate change proposal is a better-than-nothing mishmash of ideas that moderately addresses the problem while still prioritizing corporate interests. It will be met with mild, unenthusiastic approval from some experts based exclusively on the opposing party's plan of doing even less, but will nonetheless be declared “radical” by said opposing party. In other words, any Democrat plan. Right-wing news media, such as Fox News, cannot attack the American Jobs Plan based on how ineffective it will be in combating climate change because their rhetoric relies on either pretending climate change does not exist and does not need to combated in the first place, or paying lip service to the fact that it doesexist but still downplaying the danger.

Therefore, right-wing news media must attack the American Jobs Plan either by claiming it will negatively affect jobs, or through some barely-disguised lie to throw their audiences off-track. The former is more challenging because the plan is full of new jobs related to infrastructure – lots of construction jobs that will pay a reasonable wage and will sit well with Middle America. Thus, right-wing media went with the latter: a meaningless, dishonest culture war about hamburgers. The right-wing talking point came from The Daily Mail in the United Kingdom, a fish-wrap tabloid with low credibility on its best days. The Daily Mail cited a University of Michigan study and claimed that a push for lower emissions would result in a mandate for limitations in meat consumption. That is not actually what the study said, though. The researchers behind the study have gone on record, stating that The Daily Mail's interpretation of their data is erroneous. The next day, April 23rd, America Reports with John Roberts and Sandra Smith took bits and pieces from that article and molded them into a narrative for the early afternoon audience of Fox News.

Not long after America Reports butchered the story, the evening hosts served it up. Sean Hannity tried to stay relevant in the shadow of Tucker Carlson by running with this story. Jeanine Something-or-Other made a big deal out of it. She does not matter. The point is, The Daily Mail listed some out-of-nowhere hypotheticals like “burger rationing” and Fox News ran with it as if it were an actual proposal.  By Monday, one Fox News anchor walked it back in a segment that lasted all of twenty seconds, but the damage had been done. By that point, Republican politicians had already pounced and made it part of their platform. So, why hamburgers? It wouldn't work if it were a culture war about the filet mignon. A filet mignon is an “expensive” food for “east coast elites.” Plus, it has a French name. “One freedom steak, please!” It had to be burgers because of what burgers make Americans think about: America itself. By positioning Biden as anti-burger, it follows that he is un-American.

Now, let's zoom out a bit. You didn't think this whole video was going to be about burgers, right? We are only a few months into the Biden administration, and we are beginning to see the emerging media narratives that will populate cable news for at least the next four years. Right-wing media will invent or exaggerate problems with the Biden administration. Mainstream media will debunk this. The audience of right-wing media will not read the debunking or think the debunking is the real fake news. Liberal anchors and commentators, because they feel on the defensive due to all the misinformation, will cover for the Biden administration – defending him from criticism from the right and ignoring criticism from the left.

For anyone who was late to class, “liberal” is not left-wing. Liberalism is, at best, a centrist political ideology. There is precious little “left-wing media” in the United States, confined largely to alternative newspapers and zines that nobody reads, Democracy Now, and popular online personalities. Biden will be criticized by the left on social media, but he will not be criticized by by the left on cable news. Maybe here and there when CNN interviews Cornell West, but left-wing criticism will not come from the anchors or endorsed by the cable news channels. The most left-leaning host on MSNBC is Lawrence O'Donnell, who is, at most, a social democrat, and he is confined to late night only.

There is right-wing criticism of liberal politicians on cable news, there is liberal defense of liberal politicians on cable news, and there is no consistent left-wing criticism anywhere. The reason for this is obvious. It is not in the interest of media conglomerates to advocate socialism or even social democracy. This exclusion of left-wing criticism in mainstream news media has some unfortunate consequences. Because there is no widely-seen left-wing criticism of a liberal president, any left-wing criticism against the president that people actually see is grouped together in the same category as right-wing criticism.

Every time there is a left-wing or legitimate criticism of Biden, some liberal derails the conversation with “Better than Trump, though!” Yes. I know that. Anyone is better than Trump. That is not in dispute, and thatis notthe point.

See, because right-wing criticism of a liberal president is often so ridiculous, liberals can more easily dismiss left-wing criticism since they are so accustomed to criticism against their president being bull****. It creates a false notion of who the president is and what the criticisms against the president really are.

For example, Fox News spent every waking hour during the Barack Obama administration manufacturing absurd lies and making mountains out of various mole-hills. During one press conference, President Obama wore a tan suit, and Fox News claimed it was “not presidential” and even “confirms he's a Marxist.” Another time, Obama asked for a dijon mustard, and Fox News claimed this made Obama an “elitist.” This is similar to the Biden burger fiasco. There is nothing “elitist” about a mustard that is brown and not yellow, but Americans associate ordinary yellow mustard with their plain-talking American identity. This created a narrative in right-wing media, but it also created a narrative in media in general – the notion that Obama's “scandals” are all made-up, goofy nonsense like the tan suit.

We see it all the time. Whenever Donald Trump landed himself in yet another scandal, the news media would respond with headlines like “At This Point In His Presidency, Obama’s Biggest Scandal Was Using Dijon Mustard.” Among Obama's liberal supporters, the common narrative is that the Obama administration was largely without scandal and was innocent and harmless – that he was the best president we have ever had and subject to only the mildest of criticism. When someone criticizes Obama or wants to criticize Trump for comparison, the mustard and the tan suit and all the other non-troversies come up. Right-wing media uses these culture wars to rile up their base, and liberals use these culture wars as evidence that their side is without sin. “Obama's biggest scandal was only a tan suit! LOL!” In reality, the Obama administration ramped up drone strikes, expanded the war on terror, and is responsible for untold civilian deaths over the course of eight years. No, it was not for some greater good. No, it was not to “spread freedom.” No, it was not to liberate nations. The goals were the same as they were for the presidents who preceded him: to advance United States global hegemony and economic interests. The Obama administration also gave a greater mandate to ICE that resulted in mass deportations, far exceeding those in the George W. Bush administration.

Right-wing cable news media ignored all this during the Obama administration because they approved of the war on terror and anti-immigration policies. They would have had to praise the Obama administration, and they couldn't do that. Liberal cable news media rarely criticized Obama for these actions. It would not have fit within their ideology to do so. And now, under the Biden administration, we are seeing the same thing. Biden is already bombing Syria, and there is no real pushback because right-wing media loves it, liberal media does not care enough, and left-wing media barely exists. Biden's relationship with the media will almost certainly be this way for the next four years. Absolute garbage stories and made-up nonsense from Fox News, denial from MSNBC because they have more facts on their side, and no significant, legitimate criticism of the President of the United States or our place in global politics. Burger accusations and burger denials to distract the people from what is really going on.

DR. PULASKI

AUDIO 1

In 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered and introduced the world to a cast of characters who would soon become iconic. Commander Will Riker, the hotshot, young first officer and lady's man. Lieutenant Worf, the warrior with a heart of gold. Among this new crew of the Enterprise was Dr. Beverly Crusher, chief medical officer and mother to Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher. Crusher was played by accomplished stage actor and choreographer Gates McFadden. The stage has a different atmosphere than television, and when McFadden would bring her concerns and notes to the writers, they thought she was being “difficult,” a common, patriarchal refrain among men in charge with regards to women. Head writer Maurice Hurley fired McFadden between season one and two, and new doctor character was introduced: Dr. Katherine Pulaski, played by veteran Star Trek actor Diane Muldaur. To this day, Star Trek fans have a deep dislike for this character, partly because she replaced a beloved Trek character in season two, and partly because of her contentious relationship with breakout character Lieutenant Commander Data – the android with a dream of being human. When Pulaski first encounters Data, she mispronounces his name as “Data” and when corrected, is intrigued. [“With all your neural nets, algorithms and heuristics, is there some combination that makes up a circuit for bruised feelings? Possible?”]

However, in addition to being intrigued, it also comes across rather rude, as Pulaski is shown to be unaccustomed to working with an android. In the second episode of the season, Where Silence Has Lease, Pulaski accidentally refers to Data as “it” instead of him. She is corrected by Captain Picard and apologizes to Data. [“Forgive me, Mr. Data.”] She fumbles her words a bit, then asks for forgiveness again. [“Forgive me, again.”] The way Star Trek fans would see it, Pulaski is calling Data a non-person, which would obviously be completely unacceptable behavior from anyone, let alone a Starfleet officer. However, her interactions with Data show Pulaski to be merely ignorant about Data's sentience, and her apologies and recognition of Data as alive show that she is trying, albeit awkwardly and insensitively. [“Your Starfleet record shows you are alive. I must accept that.”] Pulaski's initial, incorrect assessment of Data is never portrayed as something the audience should agree with. In other words, Pulaski is not a “problematic character” in terms of her framing. So, what do I mean by that? An action movie starring a police officer might show that officer brutalizing suspects, violating civil rights, and shooting people even when he is in no danger. If the film portrays these actions as justified, then this is problematic framing – at least from the perspective of my politics.

AUDIO 2

We, the audience, are being told to both sympathize with the officer and to accept his actions as morally correct, feeding into real world glorification of law enforcement “getting the job done” by any means necessary. In contrast, Pulaski's assessment of Data is not framed as correct. It is framed as incorrect. She is corrected by both Data and Captain Picard. Pulaski's initial assessment exists in the series to be proven wrong. There is no nuance here that could give the audience the impression that Pulaski's assessment of Data may be correct. It's entirely black and white. That's usually how Star Trek works. Episodes are often science fiction fables. The lesson here is that Data's view of himself as a fully realized person is accurate and Pulaski's skepticism of Data needs to be rejected and reevaluated – and that is exactly what happens throughout the course of season two. See, because Data is so beloved and because Pulaski's initial behavior toward Data is so surprising, Star Trek fans sometimes remember only their initial conflict and not anything else. They forget – or maybe dismiss the fact – that after a mere three episodes, Data and Dr. Pulaski became friends. In the third episode of season two, Elementary My Dear Data, Dr. Pulaski, Data, and Geordi La Forge have a discussion and debate about Data's ability to think creatively.

Pulaski believes this is the spark of life and is skeptical that Data can think that way. To test Data's creativity, they go to holodeck and have Data solve a series of mysteries in the style of Sherlock Holmes. Pulaski is initially unconvinced until something goes wrong on the holodeck, as if often does. La Forge asks the computer to create a nemesis who can out-think Data, and in doing so, the holodeck gives sentience to the Prof. Moriarity holodeck character. He outwits Data and the Enterprise crew for a time, even kidnapping Pulaski. In other words, an artificial being is proven to be as creative and clever as a human – perhaps more creative. Pulaski and Data are never in conflict ever again. A few episodes later in Unnatural Selection, Dr. Pulaski risks her life to find a cure for a dying population. During her efforts, she is infected, and Data stays with her, comforting her, and trying his best to save her. Pulaski is humbled, realizes the error of her ways, and a new friendship is formed. Throughout the rest of the season, Data and Pulaski get along very well and are often allies. During the episode Pen Pals, Data makes contact with a young girl whose planet is dying. Captain Picard is uncomfortable with this and initially orders Data to break off communication. Saving the planet would violate the prime directive. Data is unconvinced that this is the moral choice, argues for saving the planet, and Pulaski sides with Data. Pulaski and Data want to save the planet, and they eventually win the argument.

AUDIO 3

In the episode Peak Performance, a man named Kolrami boards the ship. Kolrami is the renowned player of a game called Strategema. After Commander Riker is defeated in the game, Pulaski suggests that Data should face Kolrami. She encourages him to play the game, and though Data loses in the first match, he brings Kolrami to a stalemate during the rematch. Pulaski is so proud of him. [“I busted him up.”] In The Measure of a Man, when it looks like Data will be forced to resign from Starfleet, Dr. Pulaski is a guest at his going-away party. Over the course of her only season, Pulaski reevaluates her assessment of Data, shows him gratitude, realizes her own failing, and becomes both his friend and supporter. Disdain for Dr. Pulaski based solely on her initial, incorrect assessment of Data is akin to having disdain for Han Solo because he is introduced as selfish. He has an arc to go through. Character that needs development. By the end of the movie, he has redeemed himself and learned the importance of friendship and all that good stuff. Remembering Pulaski solely as who she was at the beginning of her arc is no different. The lesson we learn from the developing relationship between Data and Pulaski is that someone who has a narrow or misinformed view of a group of people can change if they listen to people in said group. It's a very Star Trek lesson. Dr. Pulaski only grows when she starts to listen to Data.

She stops saying “whatever” to him, stops referring to him in the third person when he is in the room, and stops referring to him as “it.” Her earlier behavior toward Data is never excused – nor should it be. It is always framed as wrong, and Pulaski's new outlook on Data is always framed as right. Now, people in the real world are under no obligation to forgive those who mistreat them, but the series is not making that claim. It is only showing right from wrong, and showing the potential for a person to change. Discussing Pulaski among Star Trek fans always seems to follow a pattern of outrage stemming from misremembering the character, misremembering how she was meant to be framed, and judging her as if she were a real person and not a character in the midst of an arc. I have seen grown adults accuse people who like the Pulaski character as implicitly agreeing with Pulaski's initial, incorrect assessment of Data – even though appreciation of the character usually comes from the opposite of that. Liking a Star Trek character does not mean approving of everything they did. See: every great supporting character from Deep Space Nine. Tempers run very high when it comes to Dr. Pulaski. We all need to learn to get outside more and touch the grass. If Pulaski had continued in the series for the remainder of The Next Generation's seven seasons, fans might remember her differently. There would have been a lot more to her. After all, Commander Riker also assumed Data was not a “person” during their initial meeting during Encounter at Farpoint.

AUDIO 4

[“I assume that rank is only honorary.”] Data corrects him, and Riker calls him “Pinocchio” which is a little rude and too familiar for a complete stranger to say to someone, but Riker and Data soon become friends. During the season two episode The Measure of a Man, Riker objects to Data being treated like a non-person. [“Data is my comrade.”] Captain Picard fumbles a few times in this regard as well. [“I see. It is precisely because I am not human.” “That will be all, Mr. Data.”] Nevertheless, Picard eventually becomes Data's most reliable advocate. If Pulaski had not been replaced by a returning Dr. Crusher in season three, fans would probably think of her differently, but because of how beloved Data is and how brief Pulaski was part of the Enterprise crew, her character is consistently reduced in Trek fandom as that “mean lady” who was rude to Data for two episodes. I prefer Dr. Crusher to Dr. Pulaski, but I still wonder what the series would have been if the change had remained permanent. Now, I could end the video right here, because this is the main problem that people have with Pulaski and, unfortunately, the only aspect of her character that people remember – or misremember. But isn't that the problem? That people only think about that one thing? Let's have a little fun and dig a little deeper. In The Icarus Factor, it is revealed that Dr. Pulaski once dated Commander Riker's father, Kyle. As they catch up, we learn that Pulaski has been married three times.

But all three marriages ended without acrimony, and she remained friends with all her ex-husbands.

[“I'm not complaining. They were all good men, and we're all still friends.”] I just think that's great? Toward the end of their conversation, it seems like Pulaski was also trying to get Kyle to reconnect with his son. Will and his father had been estranged for years. Pulaski arranged for Kyle to meet with Counselor Deanna Troi in hopes of mending their relationship. This is a great episode for Dr. Pulaski. It shows her to be really mature, sensible, good-natured – more than the way we remember her. In Pen Pals, she is the most forceful advocate for helping the people of the planet during the debate over the Prime Directive. In Up the Long Ladder, we learn that Dr. Pulaski has always been fascinated with Klingon culture and forms a bond with Lieutenant Worf. When Worf is suffering from a Klingon ailment more common among children of his species, Pulaski covers for him and keeps his secret from the captain. Later, Worf allowed Pulaski to take part is a sacred Klingon tea ceremony. The tea is actually lethal to humans, but Pulaski risked it, taking an antidote and hoping for the best, respecting Worf's culture too much to refuse. In Contagion, during a medical emergency, we get a great distillation of Pulaski's entire character: [“It's a time-honored way to practice medicine. With your head, your heart, and your hands. So, jump to it.”]

AUDIO 5

Pulaski is an accomplished doctor and scientist. In Who Watches the Watchers and Pen Pals, she demonstrates a practice that is helpful in first contact missions. Before the Federation makes first contact, the society is studied to see if they are about to develop warp technology. Occasionally, Starfleet officers are caught. Pulaski basically developed the “Men in Black” style procedure that makes people forget they saw aliens on their native planets. She is also an accomplished surgeon, saving Captain Picard's life in Samaritan Snare – replacing his defective, artificial heart. In Loud as a Whisper, it is revealed that she has perfected ocular implants. She offers the procedure to La Forge, but he turns down the offer, at least at the time. La Forge received ocular implants years later between the movies Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact – presumably because of the procedure that Pulaski perfected. So, yeah, I do like Dr. Pulaski. She's a good character. Not “good” like, “always morally good” – I love Garak too, and he has probably assassinated a lot of people.

RUDY GIULIANI

AUDIO 1

Politicians decide their own story in advance and sell that story through optics, through misinformation, through propaganda, through a willing media eager for heroes and uplifting stories. Throughout his career in politics, Rudy Giuliani cultivated an image for himself: the top cop, the counter-terror expert, the hero. The man who turned New York City around, the man who foresaw 9/11, and the man who saved the city on that tragic day. This image was held together through iconic visuals and a mythology that is more appealing than the truth. Since 2020, that image has changed, owing much to his relationship with Donald Trump, various scandals related to the administration and his outlandish defenses of Trump, as well as a series of embarrassing public disasters. The narrative in the media was one of surprise: What Happened to America's Mayor? The fall from grace is always a fascinating story, and the media appreciates it when such a story is written for them. However, the story of Rudy Giuliani is not that of a hero who became a villain. Anyone who followed his tenure as mayor found his “top cop” image transparent and his so-called turnaround of New York dubious. Anyone who read the report from the 9/11 Commission or further studies found his “hero of 9/11” act a poor performance. Giuliani has not fallen from a grace he never had. He simply lost control of his image, and now that he has, his actions over his career are much clearer, his motivations more obvious, and his misdeeds harder to ignore.

Rudy Giuliani grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in New York City. His father was a low level mob enforcer, a part of his life that he preferred not to acknowledge in public. It was perhaps this background that made Giuliani desire the opposite public image: a tough on crime prosecutor. Giuliani worked in the Ronald Reagan administration as Associate Attorney General and eventually in the Southern District of New York, the most sought after United States Attorney's Office. After a failed mayoral campaign in 1989, Giuliani ran again in 1993, focusing his attention on minor nuisances to the lives of New Yorkers. Giuliani did not blame the problems with the city not on poverty and the city's unwillingness to combat it. He instead blamed it on the victims of poverty – the poor themselves. “It's the street tax paid to drunks and panhandlers. It's the squeegee men shaking down the motorist waiting at a light. It's the trash storms, the swirling mass of garbage left by peddlers and panhandlers, and open-air drug bazaars on unclean streets.” Giuliani inverted the blame. The problem was not poverty. The problem was that the poor were in the way. When Giuliani was elected mayor, he weaponized the NYPD to make life miserable for the poor, to vacate them from public view, to operate under the “broken windows” style of policing, and to over-police black neighborhoods. Poverty did not go away. It was merely less visible, the goal of conservative politicians and perhaps politicians in general.

Optics over substance. The NYPD conducted sweeps of parks and other public places to arrest homeless people and move them to shelters. This was not done to help the homeless but to remove them from sight. Shelters have limitations, and Giuliani himself campaigned on reducing city services for the homeless. From time to time, the NYPD would make headlines for their gestapo tactics. When four police officers murdered African immigrant Amadou Diallo, Giuliani remained cold. According to Andrew Kirtzman, author of Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, “Minority residents had been harassed and humiliated by police so many times on the streets of their own neighborhoods that the department had come to be viewed as an occupying force, and the shooting of the African street peddler was the last straw. Watching to see how Giuliani would respond to Diallo’s death, the public saw a cold man, unsympathetic to the pain of black residents and so alienated from their leaders that he’d refused to meet with them for years.” When black leaders asked to meet with Giuliani, the Mayor refused. It was a constant source of frustration from black leaders, consistently being denied an audience with the mayor or to have their concerns heard. Giuliani's tenure as mayor was riddled with bizarre scandals and outrageous public statements, some political and some personal.

In a desperate attempt at inciting a culture war, Giuliani came down hard on the world of fine art, threatening to cut funding if museums displayed paintings that offended his Catholic sensibilities.

Giuliani feuded with the Board of Education, supporting the privatization of schools that parents voted against. These public feuds with invented enemies paled in comparison to the intersection between his romantic life and his professional life. According to Michael Wolff, author of The Tragedy of Rudy Giuliani, “No successful politician in modern media times had been so open in his disregard of the public protocols of marriage as Giuliani. As mayor, he cheated on his then wife – his second wife, Donna Hanover – carrying on a long-time affair with a twenty-eight year-old junior staffer, Christine Lategano, who was suddenly promoted to top staffer. Despite official denials, Giuliani made little effort to hide the affair, her promotion, or then the breakup of the affair in the unceremonious downgrading of Lategano to a lesser city government job. In the throws of his next public affair with Judy Nathan, a pharmaceutical sales representative he met in his favorite cigar bar, he rejected his wife, still technically Hanover, and informed her of the formal end of their marriage in a news conference.” Despite these outrageous actions, many New Yorkers and others throughout the nation praised Giuliani for bringing the crime rate down.

“The economy” is a nebulous term and often accounts for business interests more than quality of life for the poor, the working class. However, prior to becoming mayor, the crime rate in New York had already been dropping dramatically, as it had been throughout the United States since the 90's. Supporters of Giuliani ignore this, giving credit to the mayor's increase in police officers and advocacy of more aggressive police tactics. Ever since the crime rate began to drop in the 90's, study after study has concluded that the cause of this drop is more related to economy, criminogenic conditions, social change, and even reproductive rights. There is no one singular cause. In fact, among these reasons, the increase in police power and the crime bill were negligible as factors. Nevertheless, even though it is provably false, it sounds true. More police officers equals less criminals sounds like it makes sense, and people can more readily understand the concept, more readily acceptthe concept. Giuliani was counting on that. Politicians count on the fact that people will sometimes accept something that appears true without context rather than what is true when context is added.

It would be dishonest to claim that there were no victories whatsoever during Rudy Giuliani's tenure as mayor, but it would also be dishonest to give undue credit to him and to white-wash his many failings. This false image of crime and this false image of himself provides cover to do as he pleases. Giuliani helped gentrify neighborhoods in New York and made them more expensive. “Well, who cares?” he says. “The economy” went up during his tenure. Giuliani helped establish a more aggressive NYPD, the consequences of which are still being felt today. “Well, who cares?” he says. The “crime rate” went down during his tenure. Giuliani learned that, in politics, perception is reality, and this lesson served him well when he needed to establish himself as a hero to the public on the most significant day of his life. [II. 9/11] This next section is difficult to talk about, but it is also impossible to ignore. On September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani was made the most popular politician in the United States. This happened for three reasons. First, he was recorded walking down the streets of New York following the attack on the World Trade Center. Second, he touted his Office of Emergency Management as the reason any New Yorkers were saved that day. Third, he was a visible figurehead and symbol of strength during a day in which the President of the United States, George W. Bush, was comparatively absent.

Bush will forever be remembered as the president who continued reading a story to children after being told a plane had struck the World Trade Center, then kept going for another seven minutes after being told a second plane had struck and that the nation was most definitely under attack. He and his administration were also slow to make remarks on the events of that day, something that might ease the tensions of the nation, perhaps because they were too busy already plotting an endless series of wars. Who knows? To give the devil his due, Giuliani made a number of speeches both on that day and in the days that followed. He consulted experts on what he should say in order to ease the frayed nerves of the residents of New York City and, indeed, the nation. His speeches were well-received. It was the least he could do. As for any practical help, that is where giving Giuliani any credit must end. The notions that Giuliani helped spread that day about his fabled Office of Emergency Management and how he foresaw everything were absolutely wrong, and years of studies, investigations, and the 9/11 Commission itself have all proven that, if anything, Giuliani left New York unprepared for a terrorist attack due to a series of dangerous and selfish decisions. Prior to Giuliani's tenure as mayor, the city already had an office of emergency management, run by the police Department. However, Giuliani wanted the office to be completely under hiscontrol.

Giuliani established the headquarters of his Mayor's Office of Emergency Management at the worst possible location: the World Trade Center. Although terrorists previously targeted this location in 1993, and Giuliani was warned this was a potentially catastrophic mistake, he refused to take the advice of experts. Giuliani demanded that the Office of Emergency Management be at the World Trade Center for one simple reason: it was within walking distance of City Hall. Giuliani did not want to have to drive to the Office of Emergency Management headquarters, and in the case of an emergency, he wanted to be present to be seen coordinating instead of leaving it to the professionals. When the World Trade Center was struck, the OEM headquarters at that location had be evacuated. The OEM was directed by a man named Richie Sheirer, who was appointed not because of any experience or talent but because he was a Giuliani loyalist. Sheirer earned the position not because he was the best man for the job but in exchange for his endorsement of Giuliani. Sheirer was a leader of one of the few unions to endorse Giuliani's 1993 candidacy, the dispatchers' union. On 9/11, Sheirer was completely lost, unprepared for a job that he received entirely because he would follow the mayor's orders. 9/11 Commission member and former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman said that Giuliani's OEM was “...not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.”

According to Wayne Barrett, author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11, “The mythmaking about Rudy Giuliani began on September 11, and it involved an attempt to extrapolate his dramatic performance on that day into something more important. … It seemed unfeeling – almost unpatriotic – to ask whether Giuliani and his underlings had done enough to prepare New York for this terrible, although in some ways predictable, moment. It was much less understandable, as the months wore on, to allow the afterglow of that moment to impose a national amnesia.”

Another serious blunder, one that undoubtedly cost countless lives, was Giuliani not providing the fire department with modern communications equipment. They desperately needed more than the old 1960's style handie-talkies, but this was not given priority. A lot of fire fighters died that day because they did not know where to go or when to evacuate. As far as emergency services went, Giuliani was far more concerned with funding the increase in police presence and militarization because these were steps that could be seen by the public, unlike the more invisible emergency upgrades that never came. The visibility of this increased police presence would allow Giuliani's claims of lowering the crime rate to be more believable to his constituents whereas modern communications equipment would not serve his image. Anyone can make mistakes during a crisis, but these actions set the stage for this disaster took place in the years prior to 9/11. Giuliani, calm and collected in the pre-9/11 world, chose himself over the citizens of New York, time and time again. Again, from Grand Illusion, “The facts – depressing but unavoidable – were that Giuliani had allowed the city to meet the disaster of September 11 unprepared in myriad ways. … His sine qua non of preparedness for disasters like this one, the office of Emergency Management, had neither the power nor the capacity to cope with any grave crisis. … The command center had been built in the most vulnerable location possible, leaving the city without an operational headquarters when one was most needed. … The public authority that owned the World Trade Center was encouraged to evade agreements binding it to comply with the building and fire codes. And the city’s most critical agency that morning, the Fire Department, was allowed to retain ancient customs, faulty communications, and a culture that left it incapable of protecting itself, or others, in its worst moment of crisis.”

Based on the 9/11 Commission, further studies, and testimony from police officers and fire fighters, the response to the attack was hinderedby the actions and policies of Rudy Giuliani. More people died due to his negligence and ego – and no amount of optics can change that. Giuliani became “the hero of 9/11” because he happened to be mayor when it happened. He weaponized a mythology about himself, a fabrication about himself, to further his political career.

Giuliani helped popularize the idea that questioning his mythology was unpatriotic. In the aftermath of 9/11, something “unpatriotic” was tantamount to “treasonous” and few dared to question his fabricated anti-terror bonafides until years later. About two weeks after 9/11, seeing a once in a lifetime opportunity, Rudy Giuliani attempted to cancel the 2001 New York City mayoral election. The office of mayor has a two-term limit. Giuliani was on his way out as 9/11 approached, and following the attack, he tried to remain in office indefinitely, defying the law. His efforts were thwarted, and though this tyrannical action would have been seen as a massive authoritarian overreach in any other year, in any other city, conducted by any other individual, his unearned but still powerful goodwill allowed for this to be quickly swept under the rug, never damaging his reputation. Few people even remember it today. In 2008, Giuliani ran for President of the United States. However, his close association with a corrupt, tax fraud criminal named Bernard Kerik, as well as having no real identity beyond the now fraudulent “hero of 9/11” persona, Giuliani faded into the background and eventually left the race. He went back into private practice and largely disappeared from the public eye...until...

Rudy Giuliani had been out of the spotlight for years. There was speculation in 2010 that he might run for Governor of New York, but he quickly squashed it, claiming that he would spend his time on his law firms: Giuliani Partners, and Bracewell & Giuliani. He had transformed his name into one respect, however unearned that respect might have been, and he was cashing in on his image. That all changed in 2015 when Giuliani began to catch the attention of the Republican Party once more, not to mention the media. At a Republican fundraising event in 2015, Giuliani said of then President Barack Obama, “...I do not believe that President Obama loves America. … He doesn't love you. And he doesn't love me. He wasn't brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country."When criticized for this comment being a racist dogwhistle, Giuliani said it could not have been racist because Obama has “...a white mother.” Giuliani was not the only Republican testing the waters of thinly-veiled nationalism, racism and xenophobia. In May, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, and in 2016, his inflammatory, media-assisted campaign bought him the Republican nomination. Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani went way back. Mayor Giuliani helped the future president with his real estate deals and appeared together in a well-known comedy sketch at Giuliani's Inner Circle press roast.

In 2016, both saw a new relationship between them as mutually beneficial. For Giuliani, it meant that he was back in the picture as part of the Trump campaign, back on top after years in the private sector. His image had not yet been eroded, but his memory was fading. Siding with Trump allowed him to steal some of the spotlight for himself, and if elected, Giuliani could take a cabinet position – or so he thought. According to Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, “Giulianiwanted to be the secretary of state, and Trump had in so many words offered him the job. The resistance to Giuliani from the Trump circle derived from the same reason Trump was inclined to give him the job – Giuliani had Trump’s ear and wouldn’t let go. The staff whispered about his health and stability. … He was offered attorney general, Department of Homeland Security, and director of national intelligence, but he turned them all down, continuing to hold out for State. Or, in what staffers took to be the ultimate presumption, or grand triangulation, the Supreme Court.” For Trump, the benefits were even more obvious. Giuliani was still seen as a moderate Republican, despite evidence to the contrary.

If Giuliani could become his defender, his attack dog against accusations and scandal, Trump's protestations of innocence would appear more legitimate. At the Republican National Convention, “America's Mayor” said that Trump would do for the United States what he did for New York City. To the Republicans in attendance who remembered only the optics of 9/11, this was a remarkable endorsement, but for everyone who knew the truth, this was a threat. Trump did, indeed, do for the United States what Giuliani did for New York: neglect it and create a cult of personality to defend himself from accusations of that neglect. Once Trump was elected, Giuliani's gambit did not pay off, as his insistence of Secretary of State and nothing else resulted in him getting the latter: nothing.

Giuliani was instead given the role of adviser, and eventually, a more personal role as part of Trump's legal team – his personal lawyer. Trump had long seen his lawyer as his fixer – someone to disentangle himself from scandal through criminal methods that go beyond the traditional role of a lawyer. That was Michael Cohen's position for years. Once Cohen had his public fall, owing in large part to his association with Trump, there was an opening, and Giuliani jumped in to protect Trump against the Mueller investigation. Giuliani's law firm did not want to represent Trump, which forced Giuliani to go it alone. Again, from The Tragedy of Rudy Giuliani, “Beyond his atrophied legal skills, the seventy-four year-old, given his weight and his knee injury, could barely rise from a chair or get out of a car. There was the belief among many that, at best, his intellectual prowess had surely dimmed. He was, as he told Bannon and as most believed, too old to go back to practicing law. What's more, not to put to fine a point on it, he was often drunk. … Almost simultaneously with his new appointment as the president's lawyer, Giuliani's [third] marriage formally broke up. This was accompanied by a new affair, this time with a hospital administrator, Maria Rosa Ryan, 53.” The Department of Justice long ago signaled it would never indict a sitting president – regardless of the crime – which meant Giuliani didn't have to do all that much except protect Trump's public image while he was under fire and de-legitimize the investigation to the voters.

Eventually, Giuliani was given a different task altogether. With re-election looming, Trump allegedly instructed Giuliani to uncover information on likely Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter. From 2014 to 2019, Hunter Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest natural gas producers in Ukraine. In 2019, Giuliani privately urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up information on Hunter, as this would benefit Trump's re-election in 2020. Giuliani conducted this operation with two Ukrainians named Lev Parnas and Ignor Fruman. In October 2019, both Parnas and Fruman were arrested for planning to direct funds from a foreign government to United States politicians. Also that year, an investigation into Giuliani's role in this effort began. Trump himself was caught pressuring the Ukrainian President to launch an investigation against the Biden family, allegedly threatening to withhold foreign aid if he did not comply. In December, Trump was impeached for this, but partisan politics make conviction in the Senate a near impossibility for any president and for any misdeed. Nevertheless, even with Trump still in office, it became clear to even those who bought into Rudy Giuliani as “America's Mayor” and “The Hero of 9/11” that he had chosen his associations poorly and that he was on the wrong side of history.

For those who had followed his career closely, this was merely confirmation of the rot inside Giuliani that has existed from the beginning. In 2020, following the election victory of Joe Biden, Giuliani became one of the loudest proponents of the election conspiracy theory, and in doing so, permanently aligned himself with Trump. In addition to his false image as a moderate and a man of conviction, his image on a more personal level was tainted through a stream of humiliating public disasters. In 2020, Giuliani was caught – almost literally – with his pants down. In the comedy picture Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, Giuliani was introduced to a young woman portraying an even younger woman. Giuliani, [sighs], started...touching himself? In her presence? After the election, Giuliani held a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, presumably because someone in Trump's orbit mistakenly thought they had booked the event at a Four Seasons hotel. The details of what exactly went wrong are in dispute, as some have tried desperately to save face. On January 6, 2021, at a rally in Washington DC meant to incite the pro-Trump rally to action, Giuliani shouted that there must be a “...trial by combat...” and he got exactly that. Much like in the wake of 9/11, Giuliani once again tried his hand at authoritarian election interference. Only this time, with an army behind him. It failed, both in the courts following the election and in the United States Capitol on January 6th.

Trump was impeached again for inciting the insurrection or riot or whatever euphemism makes people more comfortable about the loss of life that day. Giuliani slunk away after Joe Biden was inaugurated, possibly never to be seen again after a steady stream of public humiliations and the dissolution of the image he had so carefully crafted over the course of his career. And then, the other shoe dropped. The Ukraine investigation that began in 2019 escalated in April, 2021. Giuliani's offices and home were raided by the FBI and officials from the Southern District of New York. Eighteen electronic devices were confiscated. The investigation surrounds whether or not Giuliani acted as an unregistered foreign agent for then President Trump, but the extent of the potential charges have not yet been revealed. In addition to these potential charges, Giuliani is suffering the added public humiliation of being raided by the SDNY, where he himself was once an attorney. Even if Giuliani is never arrested or convicted, this cloud of suspicion hanging over him from the district that previously propelled him into stardom is a final humiliation that will last him the rest of his life. His image has been washed away, his optics have been exposed as transparent propaganda, and all that is left is another disgraced politician, permanently melting down in front of the people he tried to fool for his entire life.