Despite the actions taken by the Trump’s (DOS) under fellow Floridian Marco Rubio, to erase the memory of 700,000 Americans who died of HIV/AIDS, the work of Pedro Zamora and World AIDS Day lives on.

(The cover of Judd Winick’s graphic novel, “Pedro and Me,” (Henry Holt & Co, NY, 2000) which tracked Judd and Pedro’s friendship on MTV’s “Real World,” and how Pedro proceeded to change the world.)

Marco Rubio was five miles away from the bedside of Pedro Zamora when the first Cuban born, internationally recognized AIDS educator died of severe complications from HIV/AIDS related illnesses on November 11, 1994.

Zamora, then 22 years old, catapulted to global fame by revealing his HIV positive status in MTV’s pioneering series “Real World,” died at Merci Hospital in Miami, while Rubio, age 23, was fumbling through his second year of law school at the University of Miami in Coral Gables.

The lives of these two Cuban-Americans—Zamora born just outside Havana; Rubio, born as an “anchor-baby” to his non-US citizen parents in Miami 9 months earlier—never intersected—in substance or in spirit— but the life and death consequences of their diametrically opposite actions have been extraordinary. Zamora gravitated toward the grace-filled path of public health education to help human beings and save lives; Rubio toward a plastic and pathetic path of denying facts he knows to be true for political gain, dismantling programs which he knows advance human health, and then eagerly erasing the memory of all who have died from his failure to act, and the millions more who will.

The U.S. Department of State’s order this week to stop recognizing World AIDS Day, despite the US being one of the original 148 nations supporting it as an effective tool for public health education since 1988, is a specific case in point, and it is happening direcly under Marco Rubio’s watch. Erase the memory of 700,000 Americans who have died of HIV/AIDS related-illnesses—and the enormous efforts to minimize that death and suffering—and you erase the problem, Rubio’s actions tell us.

In Pedro Zamora’s four brief years of life following his graduation from Hialeah High School in 1990, the year after he was diagnosed as HIV Positive during a routine Red Cross Blood Drive at his North Miami high school, Zamora became a source of life-saving information about HIV/AIDS to tens of millions of young people worldwide. His heroic efforts as a private citizen, with no power other than that of his own voice and conscience, saved lives and has only grown decades after his death.

The New York Times obituary written on November 12, 1994, described Zamora’s high school—in an overwhelmingly Cuban community—as “the place he returned to as a public speaker to warn young people like him to be careful.” Infected with the HIV virus in his Junior year at Hialeah High, Pedro’s goal was “to graduate before I die.”

A few months after he did graduate, as an honor student, President of the Science Club, captain of the Cross-country team, and voted by his peers as “most intellectual and most all-around,” Zamora—whose grades and school activities could have gained him admission to the most prestigious colleges in the United States—elected instead, to go to work for a Miami-based non-profit HIV/AIDS Resource Center, named Body Positive. He became an AIDS educator and travelled the country speaking to high school and college students about how to protect themselves from getting infected.

The New York Times wrote about Zamora’s work:

“It was in schools that he seemed to have his greatest effect. He passed around condoms in classrooms and minced no words…He would tell students that he got the virus from having unprotected sex, and that he’d probably not live to reach age 30. Some of them faced the same danger, he warned, unless they took precautions.

For many students, Zamora—articulate, the picture of good looks and good health—took the stigma away from what people had been bullied to believe about AIDS, and humanized the disease. If it could happen to him…

Zamora spoke in schools, colleges, churches and anywhere he could reach people, as a full-time AIDS educator, reaching thousands of his peers in Latino and Black communities, who were most at-risk of getting the virus. In 1993, the year Marco Rubio lumbered into law school, Pedro testified before Congress—during the height of the AIDS epidemic— calling for more explicit HIV/AIDS education programs that would speak in the language young people understood.

The different journeys of the Zamoras and the Rubios from Cuba to the United States only partially explain the differences in fundamental human values and community commitment between both families. Marco Rubio’s mother and father, natives of Cuba, left the Island in 1956 for economic reasons, and to escape the repressive and corrupt regime of President Fulgencio Batista, a paid puppet of Meyer Lansky and American organized Crime. Contrary to what Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in his cavalcade of campaigns for public office in Florida since 1998, his parents did not flee Castro’s Cuba, since Castro did not come to power until three years after they had already left, and were settled in Miami. It was the first of many lies Rubio would tell in his public career.

Zamora’s father on the other hand, fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution against the corrupt and repressive Batista government, but quickly became disillusioned when the new Castro regime became just as authoritarian as Batista’s. The Zamoras did escape from Castro’s Cuba during the Mariel boat-lift of 1980, during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. Pedro was eight years old at the time, when he, his parents, and one brother and sister, were packed onto a dangerously overcrowded boat, and made it to Hialeah, where they settled. Pedro’s mother would die of skin cancer several years later, in Florida, inspiring her youngest child to excel in science, with a goal of studying medicine to protect others from a similar gruesome death.

In twisted contrast, Marco Rubio’s family relocated from Florida to Las Vegas for a short time, where both of his parents worked in Casinos, reminiscent of the predominant jobs Cubans were force into in Batista’s reign of corruption in Cuba, when Lansky and his mobster associates were given carte blanche to operate casinos throughout Cuba, as long as they continued to pay off Batista and other corrupt officials in power.

Unlike Pedro Zamora, Marco Rubio did not show much promise or intelligence in high school, or immediately after. He went to a third-rate local Florida college on a football scholarship, and transferred within one-year to Sante Fe Community College, in Gainesville, Florida, where he received his BA in 1993—the same year Pedro Zamora was testifying before Congress about the AIDS epidemic. It was only after he graduated law school in 1996, and his election to the West Miami City Commission just two years later, that Marco Rubio begin to make his murky mark.

Unfortunately, like Rubio himself, that mark was only drawn in the sand of Florida’s beaches, and easily washed away by the most recent political currents. Originally a supporter of PEPFAR while a US Senator from Florida, who said that “every American should be proud of the program,” as Secretary of State, Rubio has presided over the systematic decimation of HIV/AIDS treatment programs of great urgency to millions of people living with HIV/AIDS around the world. According to USAIDS, more than 40 million people are living with HIV worldwide, including 1.3 million infected within the past year. For Rubio, there are no votes there.

Immediately upon being sworn in as Donald Trump’s Secretary of State in 2025, Rubio issued a “Stop Work Order,” on all PEPFAR programs—programs which had saved more than 26 million lives across 50 countries since being implemented by President George W. Bush two-decades ago.

“Does Marco Rubio want to be remembered as a Secretary of State who chose cowardice while PEPFAR was decimated and millions faced risk of death?” said Asia Russell, Executive Director of Health GAP. “Because that is the path he is choosing.”

“If these cuts to PEPFAR continue from Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the MAGA regime, their legacy will be the deaths of millions of people across the world,” said Matt Rose, senior public policy advocate for the Human Rights Campaign.

As we’ve witnessed with catastrophic cuts to HIV/AIDS programs at home and abroad, and to the termination of USAID food and medical assistance globally resulting in the deaths of 600,000 people—since Marco Rubio became Secretary of State—that appears to be the “legacy” Trump, Rubio, and his supporters seek.

Last month, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported on the current status of PEPFAR, thanks to Marco Rubio’s cowardice, and the ideological anti-science, anti-public health, anti-LGBTQ screed known as Project 2025 which Rubio still follows:

• Funding freeze/stop-work order: The stop-work order initially froze all PEPFAR programming and services, halting existing work in the field, including provision of antiretroviral therapy. Because it halted payments, many implementers had to let go of thousands of staff and end some services.
• Limited Waiver: PEPFAR received a limited waiver on February 1 (with additional information on February 6), allowing it to continue “life-saving HIV services”. However, the waiver only permits certain activities: HIV treatment and care, prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT), pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and HIV testing. Other services, including PrEP for anyone else (including those already on PrEP) and HIV prevention more generally, as well as programming for orphans and vulnerable children, are not permitted. Even with the waiver, implementers faced challenges in getting permission to resume HIV programming and difficulties getting paid.
• Dissolution of USAID: USAID was the main government implementing agency for PEPFAR, obligating 60% of its bilateral assistance in FY 2023. Without USAID and most of its staff, PEPFAR’s implementation capacity has been affected. In addition, announcements of reductions at CDC, PEPFAR’s second largest implementing agency (obligating 37% in FY 2023), could further affect PEPFAR.
• Canceled awards: In early 2025 it was reported that the administration canceled 86% of all USAID awards. KFF analysis found that of the 770 global health awards identified, 379 included HIV activities, 71% of which were terminated, including several HIV treatment awards as well as most HIV prevention..Impact on PEPFAR Services and OutcomesNumerous other reports have documented the impacts of these actions on services and outcomes:
• A recent analysis found that the disruption in PEPFAR funding was associated with reduced access to HIV services and commodities, including antiretroviral treatment, PrEP, and HIV, CD4, and viral load tests.
• UNAIDS offices have identified several impacts including: the loss of thousands of HIV health workers in Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Mozambique; disruptions to diagnostic and treatment services for pregnant women and children in Zimbabwe; partial or complete cessation of community outreach services in Angola and Eswatini; and the expected loss of a quarter of the workforce of the largest network of people living with HIV in Ukraine.
• A rapid assessment survey of 108 WHO country offices found that almost half reported moderate or severe disruptions to HIV services, including for medicines and health products, due to the U.S. foreign aid freeze and other shortages.
• In addition to these impacts, several modeling studies have estimated potential effects of funding reductions. For example, one estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, ending PEPFAR funding could result in 565,000 new HIV infections over 10 years and reduced life expectancy of people living with HIV by 3.71 life-years.

Despite Rubio’s mad-dash away from reality, the World AIDS Day theme for 2025 is perfectly on point: “Overcoming Disruption, Transforming the AIDS Response.”

Those of us who remember the courageous, visionary work of Pedro Zamora, and the thousands of others who are still fighting valiantly to ease the lives of the 40 million people worldwide still living with AIDS, have overcome greater disruptions, and more difficult threats to human life. HIV/AIDS is evolving, but by no means over. As my mother, a polio-survivor until age 92 continually reminded me: “It was 60 years since the identification of the Polio Virus, and the discovery of the Polio vaccine.”

Long-time leading AIDS Activist, educator and the co-founder of PrEP4ALL Peter Staley put all this agita into the proper perspective for The Advocate: “ It just seems to be petty and hostile, frankly. It’s very reminiscent of the Reagan Administration which largely ignored the epidemic.”

As the New York Times observed on November 25, 2025, when Marco Rubio ordered Department of State employees to “refrain from publicly promoting World AIDS Day through any communications channels,” the Times noted:

“Every year since 1988, the US has marked December 1, as World AIDS Day, when people mourn those who died of the the disease, honor efforts to contain the epidemic and raise awareness among the general public. Not this year.”

Yet, the original acts of AIDS Awareness since the discovery of the HIV Virus in 1981, did not come about because of government policy, but because of the absence of government policy. AIDS activists, like Pedro Zamora and Peter Staley and Cleve Jones drove awareness and action, and treatment and care, and pushed governments in the US around the world to respond.

We still will not be silenced, nor erased, nor go away. Too many friends have been lost, too much suffering has been endured; too much hope is at stake.

Look at Pedro Zamora’s life; look at his face, his promise, his struggle. Look at the enormous impact he had upon millions of lives in his too-short 22 years of life.

Then, look at the “petty, hostile” acts of Marco Rubio, Trump and Pogrom 2025’s hate screed. Then, ask yourself, whose side are you on? Will you permit all of what we’ve achieved over the past 40 years to be erased? Will you quietly allow the East Wing of the White House to be demolished? Will you stay quiet while 400,000 children are starved to death by the assassination of the food programs of USAID? Will you be silent while who and what you’ve loved all your life is obliterated?

Like Judd Winick, it’s Pedro and me. . . and you, who will determine the outcome.

The fearless Michelangelo Signorile wrote the best piece on the NYC Mayoral campaign, pointing out that Zohran Mamdani was the true heir to the ideals of Vito Marcantonio, LaGuardia and Mario Cuomo.

Steve Villano

Nov 22, 2025

(Millions of words were written about the historic New York City 2025 Mayoral Campaign, which saw the highest voter turnout since 1969, and resulted in the overwhelming election of the first Muslim American to be NYC Mayor in history. None were as perceptive and incisive as this piece (see below) done by Michelangelo Signorile in his Substack column, “The Signorile Report.”

As with the election of all “firsts” in New York—the first Italian-American Mayor, the first Jewish Mayor, the first Black Mayor—the election of the first Muslim-American as Mayor was not without a barrage of hate and “fill in the blank_____Phobia) aimed at Mamdani. What was most disturbing for many of us who have fought against hate and bias our entire lives—and who worked for years with former Governor Mario Cuomo, a strong voice against discrimination of all kinds—was to hear so much of the hate speech coming from Cuomo’s own son, who knew better.

The Brooklyn-born Signorile has always courageously embraced truth, either in print, on his radio program, or on television. He is the author of four books, with his first, “Hitting Hard,” being published 20 years ago, becoming an instant bestseller, and smashing through many barriers for LGBTQ writers and our community.

His piece on the NYC Mayoral election of 2025 does precisely the same thing for ALL communities.)

Cuomo disgraced all Italian-Americans. Mamdani honored them in his closing.

Cuomo closed by demonizing immigrants, forgetting his own family history. Mamdani, in his closing video, lifted up the legacy of New York’s Italian-American political leaders who fought for workers.

Michelangelo Signorile

Nov 04, 2025

New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Congressman Vito Marcantonio of East Harlem

As the New York mayor’s race came to a close, Andrew Cuomo ratcheted up racism and bigotry, embracing Islamophobia as he attacked Zohran Mamdani’s Muslim identity and faith.

Appearing on MAGA right-wing talk show host Sid Rosenberg’s program, Cuomo replied to Rosenberg’s grotesque claim Mamdani would “be cheering” if another 9/11 happened, by laughing and then stating, “That’s another problem.” Cuomo-aligned super PACs repeatedly ran racist ads, depicting Mamdani as dangerous because he’s Muslim.

It was on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox Business, however, where Cuomo and his host, both Italian-Americans, demonized Mamdani as an immigrant in ways their own families surely were treated when they came to this country. It was pretty stunning.

Whether it was about their grandparents or great-grandparents, Bartiromo and Cuomo surely know the stories of discrimination and hostility that lasted well into the early 20th century. They surely know that the earliest Italian-American immigrants were spit on, facing segregation and violence.

And yet, Bartiromo wondered how Mamdani, “is going to treat all of those people who are still in mourning from losing their lives? 3,000 people. I mean, all the first responders that we lost on 9-11.”

She continued:

I guess I’m wondering if you’re expecting New York to look more like London. You go to London right now and it is largely Muslim. Women are completely covered up.

Cuomo said that Mamdani is “out of sync with how New Yorkers feel,” even though New York is a city of immigrants and Mamdani is an immigrant.

“I just think he doesn’t get it. He’s dual citizenship,” Cuomo said. “He was a citizen of Uganda.”

It was breathtaking coming from people descended from a group that was once considered dirt in this country.

The Signorile Report is free and reader-supported. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism. Thanks!

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brent Staples wrote in a New York Times piece in 2019, headlined, “How Italians Became “White’”:

Darker skinned southern Italians endured the penalties of blackness on both sides of the Atlantic. In Italy, Northerners had long held that Southerners — particularly Sicilians — were an “uncivilized” and racially inferior people, too obviously African to be part of Europe.

Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people.

They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white nigger” and “nigger wop.”

The penalties of blackness went well beyond name-calling in the apartheid South. Italians who had come to the country as “free white persons” were often marked as black because they accepted “black” jobs in the Louisiana sugar fields or because they chose to live among African-Americans. This left them vulnerable to marauding mobs like the ones that hanged, shot, dismembered or burned alive thousands of black men, women and children across the South.

It was for that reason that Cuomo’s and Bartiromo’s conversation disgraced all Italian-Americans. These two certainly aren’t holding up the legacy of those Italian-Americans who pushed back against hate and also fought for the rights of workers, Jews, Latinos and many others.

But Mamdani is.

His closing video is remarkable, offering a history lesson and leaning in to the socialist polices of New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and the lesser known East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

https://embed.bsky.app/embed/did:plc:j5hrotody26iqi24hcusufxu/app.bsky.feed.post/3m4roci5moc2q?id=011555638398357493

There are many who dismiss our vision for New York as impossible. To them, I say we need look only to our past for proof of how we can shape the future.

Tomorrow is Election Day. And this is the final Until It&#x27;s Done of our campaign.<br><br><a href=”https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:j5hrotody26iqi24hcusufxu/post/3m4roci5moc2q?ref_src=embed”>[image or embed]</a></p>&mdash; Zohran Kwame Mamdani (<a href=”https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:j5hrotody26iqi24hcusufxu?ref_src=embed”>@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social</a>) <a href=”https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:j5hrotody26iqi24hcusufxu/post/3m4roci5moc2q?ref_src=embed”>November 3, 2025 at 8:14 PM</a></blockquote><script async src=”https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js” charset=”utf-8”></script>

La Guardia is a storied, iconic mayor in New York’s history, a man born to Italian immigrants who served as mayor from 1934 to 1946. Marcantonio, a seven-term member of the U.S. House, is less known but no less impactful for workers, promoting social policies that helped millions.

As Mamdani explains, Marcantonio, La Guardia’s protégé—known simply as Marc to folks in East Harlem—was an “unapologetic socialist” who was a “steadfast ally to organized labor” and immigrant workers. He investigated worker abuses and fought in Congress for the rights of workers:

He provided English literacy lessons to thousands of newly-arriving immigrants, and he fought to expand Social Security to the countless domestic workers who’d been excluded. In the words of the great Dorothy Day, “the poor of East Harlem felt that he loved them and was interested in them”….

When he was called a radical, Marc responded, “If it be radicalism to believe that our natural resources should be used for the benefit of all and not for the purposes of enriching just a few, then I plead guilty to the charge.”

Mamdani gets his inspiration from those who fought for equality many decades ago in New York. Cuomo arrogantly forgets the roots of Italian-American immigrants and Italian-American politicians and activists who fought for other immigrants, while he trashes immigrants like Mamdani and many others.

Mamdani, however, is inspired by those very Italian-American politicians in history and celebrates their achievements. It should shame Cuomo—if he were still capable of feeling shame. This makes Mamdani not only a class act; he’s a politician who knows his history, and who wants to build on the legacy of those who made a difference in people’s lives.

Trump world’s Tracey Flick (“ME, Pick ME,”) Elise StefanICK, and it’s 2nd Favorite Felon, Fraud & Con Man, George Santos–THE perfect Trump team for NYS, who’ll pardon Trump for ALL his State crimes.

George Santos & Elise Stefanik. It takes a fraud to know one. (official GOP Photo)

Over the past two years, I’ve written a few pieces about Georgie Santos, the former Drag Queen of a thousand lavish costume changes and faces.

Santos, a Diva Dirigible, hovering over two years of Republican politics, and endorsed and embraced by fellow Congressional con artists like Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin, had a tumultuous tumble from glory into the gory details of his lies, his make-believe-life, and finally, prison.

Like the Hindenburg blimp bursting into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey, the imposter immolated himself as he lied and lied as fast as he could flap his arms and his gums, and got booted out of Congress.

Then, came a swath of indictments for breaking a number of federal laws, followed by his arrests, his criminal convictions, and finally, a 7 year jail sentence, for defrauding many of his followers out of some $350,000—all of which he was pardoned from by Trump earlier this year because he was “100% Trump.”

Santos, the shape shifting showman, quickly became Elise Stefanik’s favorite dragged queen. She raised money for her Georgie, and lavished praise upon him across New York State as a future Republican leader. Fortunately, we have photos, and it appears that Stefanik—the Tracey Flick of American politics—absorbed the Santos-style of lying and then lying about the lies she continues to tell. Like Georgie Santos, StefanICK was “100 % Trump.”

Affectionally known (by me) as “ICK” ( see my Ode to Ick, below) Tracy wants everything she sees. Congress? Sure. House leadership? Drool. Trump running mate? Of course! UN Ambassador? Why not, she was in the Model UN in High School! Governor of NY? YES! She did lead the NYS Young Republicans, before she mentored the latest crop of young anti-Semites presently heading the group! ICK will try anything! ESPECIALLY if it brings her more attention, and, could put her in a position to Pardon Donald Trump from all his New York State crimes! Win! Win!

ICK.

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Stefanik is skilled at coddling criminals, having winked at Georgie Santos’ illegal use of campaign funds for Botox, Spa Treatments, lavish hotel visits, fancy meals and expensive clothing—all such stereotypically Drag Queenie stuff. But ICK and her GOP ilk like her in the House, LOVE a good fraud, as evidenced by their cult-like boot-licking of Trump, and their continuing masquerading as “lawmakers,” ever since their foot-soldiers tried to burn the U.S. government down on January 6, 2021, and were pardoned of their felonies by the Felon-in-Chief.

Trump, and his busted little valise, Elise, advocated for a new lower level of cultishness I call “Santos Ria” (named after Georgie) built on a flim-flam framework of fraud, deception, lying and lawlessness by still—to this very day of ICK’s announcement of her candidacy of Governor of New York State— defending the pardoning of 1,500 January 6 Felons—among them many violent criminals, pedophiles, wife-beaters, anarchists, terrorists, thugs, and probably a few Communists.

ICK’S upstate New York Congressional Constituents—abandoned by her use/abuse raw ambition again and again—could be forgiven if they exhumed the long-dead body of Sam Stratton, and elected him in absentia to represent them. Even a Dead Sam would be better than being fleeced by Tracey StefanICK, shape-shifting as fast as she can into the form of her fellow Young Republican leader, Georgie Porgy Santos….

So before you even think you have to listen to the Elise the Busted Valise’s bloviation about Mamdani or liberals or Mike Johnson’s 6-week Congressional vacation to avoid discussion of the Epstein Files, remember who was the chief cheerleader for George “The Pardoned Felon” Santos as a key part of the “Next Generation of Republican Leadership.”

Isn’t that exactly the kind of judgement and constituent service you want to see in the Governorship of New York State? A vote for ICK is a vote supporting the pardon of Georgy Santos, a vote for the pardon of 1500 January 6 felons, and a vote for the future pardon of Donald Trump for all of his New York State crimes.

Ick.

A decadent party of America’s richest & most callous at Mar-A-Lago, celebrated the denial of Food Stamps to 40 million Americans, when destroying the SNAP program gave tax cuts to the rich.

(Donald Trump and his fat cat friends feasted and partied all Halloween Night at Mar-a-Lago while 40 million Americans, mostly children, worried about where their next meal was coming from. The only appropriate question is: What would the fitting punishment be for the cruel crime vs. humanity?)

Dancers at Trump’s Halloween party as people begin losing food stamps under his administration pic.twitter.com/LWknoEktw6

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) November 1, 2025

In Stephen King’s novel Thinner, an arrogant, obese, sleazy, wealthy and politically connected lawyer runs over and kills an old woman crossing the street, because he’s getting a hand-job in his car, and loses control of the steering wheel. The lawyer escapes legal punishment for the crime by leaning hard on all of his friends in the local police department and the courts to exonerate him.

Furious by the failure of this obese, crapulent, flatulent oligarch to be brought to justice, the woman’s 106-year old father—a member of a group of Romani (gypsy) outcasts casts a curse on the killer of his daughter by uttering one word: “thinner.”

The curse takes effect on the obese oligarch immediately. No matter how much fattening food he stuffs into his large pie-hole of a mouth—hamburgers, french fries, cheesecake, ice cream, gold-decorated chocolate bon bons—he loses weight at an incredible rate of speed. The more he gorges himself, the thinner he gets.

We’ve got to find a fitting punishment like that for each and every guest at Mar-A-Lago on Halloween Night, 2025, there to celebrate Donald Trump’s “Great Gatsby” themed Ball for Billionaires. They dined on the richest, most fattening foods, while 40 million Americans were being forced to go hungry, because the corpulent capitalists in the room took away the money meant for Food Stamps to gorge themselves on bigger pieces of seven-layer cake, and gargantuan tax cuts.

The grotesque sight of the nation’s wealthy, with their boiling teeth glistening in the glare of kleig lights and feather-fans, wallowing in wave after wave of festooned food they would never finish—having fun while they forced tens of millions of children to go hungry, could never be erased.

I shared with my granddaughter Stephen King’s story, and the curse of “thinner,” upon the truly evil, heinous and unjust, and the savvy 16-year old thought it wouldn’t be punishment enough for the jewelry-dripping perpetrators of crimes vs. our youngest humans.

“That crowd likes being thin,” she observed. “They spend all their waking hours obsessing over how to lose weight. I’d flip the curse, and call it “Fatter.”

I sat up straight.

“Brilliant, “I said to my brilliant grandchild. “Brilliant The more they stuff into their faces, and their pockets, the fatter, and more obese they get. Their caloric corpulence multiplies ten-fold. Each morsel of food they take away from the mouths of babes, adds layers of flab to every part of these pigs. Each dollar they take away from programs to help the the poor and working people, converts to pounds of flesh, where they least want it to show.”

I shared with her how Stephen King’s story ended, but we decided to come up with our own, more fitting ending.

They’d just burst, like Augustus Gloop, and exist no more.

The Co-Creator of the “Great Schlep”–which organized young, progressive Jews to persuade their parents and grandparents to vote for Barack Obama–writes why some NYC Rabbis have Mamdani all wrong.

(Photo by (Selcuk Acar /Anadolu via Getty Images)

(Editor’s Note: Every so often, someone captures a moment so spot on—in so many facets—that his or her insights must be shared with thoughtful people at just the correct moment in time. Mik Moore, a writer for the historic Jewish Telegraphic Agency—which even Progressive Jews read—has done just that with this important piece.

I post Moore’s piece admitting to a few biases:

First, I am a human being, and believe that all of us deserve dignity, and equality; that no single group is “chosen” as special over another, by virtue of anything. We are all “chosen people,” by virtue of our creation and our existence.

Secondly, I am a Jew, and I believed that before I converted to Judaism 45 years ago; I believe that even more strongly today, as an active member of a Jewish congregation in Santa Rosa, California.

Third, I’ve known Andrew Cuomo for 40 years. He hired me to work in his father—Mario Cuomo’s— first Administration in December, 1984. In my book, “Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo and My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, NY, NY, 2017) about my work for a lover of the law like Mario Cuomo, and my brother Michael’s work for a violent violator of the law, John Gotti, I quoted Andrew Cuomo extensively in a positive light, and wrote about his skills in getting things done in government.

When it came time to pick a title for my book I made certain not to use the word “Mob” on the cover, in conjunction with Mario Cuomo’s name—since they were polar opposites, and I was bearing witness to the fact that the Cuomos had NO mob connections, unlike Donald Trump. I knew, my own family was connected to the Mob, and I wrote the book to crush the ugly, negative, anti-Italian stereotype that had been used repeatedly against Mario Cuomo, a man of impeccable integrity.

Ironically, Andrew Cuomo is using similarly destructive, ugly and negative anti-Muslim stereotypes against Zohran Mamdani, and he knows better, since he knows the power of such stereotypes to stigmatize, divide and polarize people.

Unlike most people in public life, Andrew Cuomo was blessed with extraordinary role models in his mother and father, paradigms of public service and love for others.

His father stood strong and courageously against the forces of hate and right-wing fanaticism that took power under both Reagan Administrations and the Administration of George “Poppy” Bush. Mario Cuomo was a champion of working family, liberal and progressive values at a time when “liberalism” was used as a slur, the way Donald Trump’s right wing extremists—in a more violent version of McCarthyism— now throw around the word “socialist.”

The favorite pejorative of “Cultural Marxism” used by Trump, Vance and Stephen “Goebbels” Miller, and the indefensible Pete Hegseth today, is precisely the term Hitler and his henchmen used to demonize the Jews of Europe during the 1930’s and 1940’s, leading to the systematic extermination of six million Jews, socialists, disabled individuals, trade unionists and gays. Andrew Cuomo, knows better, and he knows the evil consequences of such dangerous language, exhibited by his own strong support of Marriage Equality in New York State.

Fourth, I met Bibi Netanyahu and Arik Sharon decades ago when I worked with Mario Cuomo, and I also had the great privilege of meeting Shimon Peres, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Yitzhak Rabin. I admired the great courage and moral strength of these world leaders, and was particularly stricken by the angst and pain etched into Yitzhak Rabin’s face—a general in the 1967 War— when I was fortunate to meet with Rabin in his office in Israel, just a few short years before he was assassinated campaigning for peace between Israel and Palestine, and a two-state solution.

Rabin, an advocate of peace because of all of the death and destruction he had seen first hand, was murdered by a fanatical Extreme Right Wing Jew who was a disciple of convicted Jewish terrorist Meir Kahane—a hero to several of the ultra nationalist extremists occupying positions of power in Netanyahu’s extremist Israeli government, still adamantly opposed to a two-state solution and to the continued existence of the Palestinian people.

Andrew Cuomo knew all of this history, when he decided to join Netanyahu’s legal defense team, and argue against “War Criminal” charges brought against the Israeli leader by the ICC, the International Criminal Court, for carrying out genocidal attacks against civilian, non-combatants in Gaza, killing 75,000 human beings, mostly women and children, and bringing about severe sanctions vs. the Israeli people by the United Nations, and by leading Western nations including the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Norway, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Cuomo consciously made the cheap, morally lazy, political pandering calculation that ALL Jews were alike, and that we all blindly supported Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity in Gaza, and on the West Bank. Not even the IDF’s (Israeli Defense Force) own ‘Code of Ethics’—which defines proportionality of counterattack as a rule of war and prohibits the slaughter of non-combatants—supports Netanyahu.

As Cuomo, and many other prominent Democrats and donors to the Democratic Party will learn on election day this year, we Jews have strong ethical, humanitarian and moral values, that transcend base tribal appeals. Our children and grandchildren are advancing those universal humanitarian values, without prejudice or paralyzing, blind group pride, and doing as we hoped to teach them by example: Advocating on behalf of ALL humanity, not just for a “chosen” few. (By Steve Villano)

**

Jewish fears about Zohran Mamdani reveal more about us than about him — and it’s a problem

by Mik Moore, Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

October 21, 2025 8:23 pm

On the surface, I have a lot in common with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. We have 138 mutual friends on Facebook. We are roughly the same age. And the synagogue he has led for the past quarter century, Park Avenue Synagogue, is where I attended Hebrew school as a teenager in the early 90s, learning with some of the city’s best teachers.

And yet when I saw Cosgrove’s jeremiad against Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Party nominee for mayor of New York, I couldn’t find much overlap at all. So as his sermon makes the rounds, I decided to share my perspective as a New Yorker with decades of experience engaging Jewish voters.

While Cosgrove was finishing high school in Los Angeles, David Dinkins was elected mayor of New York. He had a long record of alignment with Jewish institutions regarding Israel. Dinkins opposed anti-Zionist resolutions at the United Nations. He traveled to Israel three times, including during the Gulf War while mayor.

I remember in 1990, South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela had been released from prison and was planning to visit New York City. Dinkins, who like most New Yorkers considered Mandela a hero, was thrilled to welcome him. The Jewish communal leadership, on the other hand, had mixed feelings. See, Mandela saw parallels between the Palestinian struggle and his own, and was an ally of Yasser Arafat. Therefore, Mandela was tainted.

Dinkins served just a single term as mayor. Despite putting the city on a path towards greater safety, he faced significant challenges (including the Crown Heights riot) and was replaced by notorious bully — and future Trump attorney — Rudy Giuliani. Jewish voters may have been the difference in denying Dinkins a second term (and the great Ruth Messinger a first!).

David Dinkins was the first non-white person to serve as mayor of New York. Today, Zohran Mamdani is seeking to be the city’s first Muslim mayor. He is supported by many Jews, possibly more than any other candidate, including thousands of members of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, an organization founded when it organized a Shabbat service at B’nai Jeshurun to welcome Mandela to New York back in 1990.

I was born in New York City and have lived here most of my life. Every single mayor in my lifetime has supported Israel, regardless of its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. None has supported Palestine.

To put it another way: Palestinian New Yorkers have never had a mayor who they would consider an ally when it comes to issues impacting their homeland. Many mayors have been happy to fete Israel’s worst leaders. Today, the main challenger to Mamdani, Andrew Cuomo, joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legal defense team. Cosgrove said Jews will be unsafe if Mamdani is mayor. Will Palestinians in New York City be unsafe if Cuomo is elected?

Remember during the Democratic primary debate, when the candidates were asked which country they would visit first if elected mayor? Many, including Cuomo, said Israel. But Mamdani didn’t say he’d visit Palestine; he said he’d stay here and focus on his actual job: running New York City.

Mamdani has never said anything to suggest he would withhold protection from Jews; on the contrary, he has repeated his commitment to their safety. Mamdani’s love for New York and New Yorkers is impossible to miss; he is running a campaign driven by the belief that this great city should be available to all. Contrast that with his suburban nepo rival, who is trying to fearmonger his way into office.

In his sermon, Cosgrove suggests that Jews need to prioritize the safety of other Jews over non-Jews, to prioritize the safety of Israeli Jews over Palestinians. He suggests that this is natural, an act of self-interest common to all communities. He said, “For Jews, ahavat yisrael, love of Israel, does take precedence over other loves. Every human being is created with equal and infinite dignity, yet we prioritize the needs of our families, our people, and our nation.”

Maybe this is why Cosgrove and so many others struggle to understand how Mamdani, as a Muslim anti-Zionist, could ever care as much about Jewish New Yorkers as Muslim New Yorkers. They have projected their own value system onto him, and don’t trust him to act on behalf of those outside his own group. (Or maybe they don’t realize that for true New Yorkers, the outgroup is New Jerseyans.)

In 2008, I was the co-creator of The Great Schlep, the campaign Cosgrove mentioned in his sermon, where young Obama supporters convinced their skeptical grandparents to vote for the first Black president. He thinks we need one in reverse, with the wise elders of the Upper East Side schooling the wild youth of Brooklyn. But in fact, despite their distinct views about Israel, the dynamics that made older Jewish Democrats initially skeptical of Obama are the same that make you and your congregants skeptical of Mamdani. It’s fear, stoked by Israeli hasbara, amplified by right-wing media, and seasoned with a pinch (or more) of old-fashioned bigotry.

The good news is that, whether or not Cosgrove or his congregants vote for him, I believe Mamdani will not turn his back on them. Unlike Trump, or Giuliani, or Cuomo, he doesn’t subscribe to the Roy Cohn model of politics. He actually takes the notion of being a public servant seriously. I hope we are all lucky enough to experience it.

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Mik Moore

is the CEO of Moore+Associates, a creative agency based in New York City that works with political campaigns and non-profit organizations. He is the co-founder of Schlep Labs, a Jewish Super PAC, serves on the steering committee of The Jewish Vote and on the boards of several Jewish non-profits.

The first “NO KINGS” day was on the Porcine Emperor’s 79th Birthday, when some five million Americans expressed love for Democracy, and disdain for Autocracy. Now, Trump reveals his naked hatred.

(The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no allegiance to the US Constitution, no respect for democracy, no heart, no conscience & no soul. But he has spawned the largest pro-democracy, pro-America demonstrations in the nation’s 250 year history.)

For Donald Trump’s 77^th birthday 2 years ago, he was given the gift of a 37-count criminal indictment, with 31 of those charges pertaining to blatant violations of the Espionage Act, including spilling Nuclear secrets.

His actions are similar to what former National Security Advisor John Bolton has just been charged with, and the 74-year old case that resulted in execution by electrocution of Ethel & Julius Rosenberg for violating the Espionage Act. It’s seems so serendipitous, and certainly poetic, that, in the end, the lives of Trump and the Rosenbergs are so intertwined.

Four years ago, on the anniversary of the arrest of Ethel Rosenberg for allegedly providing valuable, top-secret information to the Russians about nuclear weapons designs, radar, sonar and jet propulsion engines, the WashingtonPost broke an explosive story headlined: “FBI searched Trump’s home to look for nuclear documents and other items, sources say.”

Now that we have physical evidence that boxes and boxes of highly classified US secrets—including Nuclear plans, and plans of how best to attack the US—were left in Trump’s bathroom, in a public ballroom and strewn about in closets and storage rooms, Trump’s illegal violations of the Espionage Acts are veering into Ethel and Julius territory.

As we’ve witnessed everyday in Trump’s incessant Smash, Grab & Grift 2nd Administration’s frenzied fever to snort up every dollar and put EVERYTHING in the U.S. up for sale, the prospect of Trump selling highly classified nuclear documents to Vladimir Putin or the Saudis for billions of dollars—or of his recklessness of his mishandling top secret documents he should never have had–is entirely plausible. It adds an entirely new, and dangerous, dimension to Trump’s reign of terror, including the possibility that Russian spies or foreign agents from anywhere, could have photographed these top secret military documents, while using the bathroom at Mar-A-Lago, or that Trump is still monetizing similar top secret, classified information—even while he is President.

Like Trump’s friend, mentor, role-model and lawyer Roy Cohn—lionized in the movie, “The Apprentice,” as Trump’s primary tutor—I grew up thinking that only alleged “communists” or “communist sympathizers,” spilled nuclear secrets to the Russians, and our enemies, not Presidents. After all, it was Roy Cohn who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for violating the Espionage Act. My faith in the US Justice system has been shaken because Trump hasn’t been treated exactly the same way as Ethel & Julius. It is so unfair, as Trump himself would say. And, since the foreign asset Trump was not treated the same way the Rosenbergs were, as a Jew, I believe the actions vs. the Rosenbergs were blatantly Anti-Semitic. It’s eerily like Trump and his team of hatemongers using the term “Cultural Marxists,” a phrase popularized by Adolf Hitler do demonize progressive Jews.

After I devoured the brilliantly researched and written 49-page criminal indictment of Trump which lays out not only his continuing theft of top secret classified documents over two years, but his willful obstruction of the Justice Department’s efforts to retrieve them, visions of Ethel Rosenberg, played by Meryl Streep in the HBO production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, began dancing on my brain.

Quickly, I ran to get my printed and signed copy of Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.

I turned to the page where the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg shows up at Roy Cohn’s bedside, as he lay dying of AIDS. Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s personal role-model and fellow Studio 54 partier, as well as his attorney, had hounded Ethel and her husband Julius into electric-chair executions three years after her arrest in 1950.

ETHEL: They won, Roy. You’re not a lawyer anymore.

ROY: But am I dead?

ETHEL: No. They beat you. You lost.

(Pause)

ETHEL:

I decided to come here so I could see if I could forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly. I have borne my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needlesharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June 19. (June 19, 1953, was the day Ethel and her husband Julius were executed. Ethel had to be electrocuted three times before she finally died.) It burns acid green.

I came to forgive, but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ‘cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you could never defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: better he had never lived at all.”

Will the same thing be said of Trump? Is Trump destined to become his own Roy Cohn? Will he die as Cohn did, in his own shit, and stripped of everything he ever knew?

The only President in all of American history to be twice impeached, twice indicted of crimes, and twice arrested (so far), Trump’s recklessness, and flagrant disregard for any and all laws, have surprised even those of us who have long pegged him as a criminal cipher, a con, a fraud, a liar, and a mob-boss wannabe. Is he capable of selling nuclear secrets to the Russians or the Saudis, the UAE, Qatar, or the highest bidder? Is he capable of forgiving the Qataris of funding the single biggest act of violece and terror vs. the U.S., and accept gilded planes, gifts and millions of dollars in bribes from them? Would he sell pardons to the highest bidders? White wash the most heinous sex crimes committed against children in U.S. history? Dangle a pardon for the female Sex Trafficker who facilitated and participated in those crimes in exchange for her silence about his involvement?

Perhaps, the only appropriate eulogy that could be given for Trump’s lawless, 50 + year temper tantrum and his unending drag show of distraction in public, is a variation on the theme expressed by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg—thrice electrocuted– over Roy Cohn’s deathbed: “Better he never had never lived a public life at all.”

The Emperor has no clothes, no brain, no heart, no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, no respect for Democracy, no conscience, and no soul. Everything about him and his team of grifting thugs is revolting; showing up to defend the Rule of Law, democracy, the Bill of Rights, and the fundamental ideals of America itself, is an appropriate patriotic —and legal—response to the theft of a nation’s secrets, its’ substance, and its’ soul.