We really need to talk about Vickie Paladino.
To be clear, our group, Eastern Queens Greenway, isn’t in a fight with the Republican Council member; we're simply a group of neighbors asking for safe infrastructure for our kids.
But we are trying to unravel why she has launched a culture war about cycling in general and our greenway work in specific.
On Oct. 24, the Department of Transportation hosted a workshop on a potential Northern Queens Greenway. Like the two previous workshops (and the hundreds of DOT workshops for other projects), there was a short introduction and facilitators led small groups to gather comments on maps. But unlike other DOT workshops, this one was marred by Council Member Paladino, who initially misled her supporters into thinking this would be a public hearing, akin to a community board meeting, rather than the kind of feedback sessions DOT does all the time.
What is going on?
Before the meeting, Council Member Paladino misled her supporters by claiming that they would be able to give testimony (like a public comment session at a community board meeting).
She even provided a QR code for people to sign up "to testify," but the link went to the DOT attendance form — a form that specifically said this meeting was about community feedback on crafting a plan. The time for testifying, community board-style, is a future part of the lengthy DOT outreach procedure, which Paladino certainly knows.
Even though it was a DOT meeting, Paladino started it off by announcing that she likes bikes, but no one uses them. This started an uproar. Half the room — including members of our group who had ridden to the meeting using bike lanes — booed, while the other half of the crowd yelled its approval of her statement.
Paladino did say that everyone should be civil and save their comments for the individual planning sessions that were being held at half a dozen large tables. But the people who supported her mostly didn't join the discussions at the tables led by DOT staff members. Instead, they roamed around, making critical comments but making no concrete suggestions.
So Paladino seized the mic again, saying that she was tired of "outsiders" coming to her community to tell "us" what to do. Then she urged her supporters to storm out. We had the impression that marching out of the meeting room was part of her plan all along: She could say she tried working with the DOT while not being associated with the planning process.
The culture war
Why did they storm out? We may be able to deconstruct this reactionary move, and the grievance politics behind it, by looking specifically at what Paladino said:
"Herein lies the biggest concern, taking one neighborhood and intersecting in with another neighborhood makes up for what I consider kind of like a runway if anybody is committing crimes that's a big concern of mine, they could hop on that."
This was a surprising claim, since the neighborhood is already riven by existing roads (perhaps that's why the common term is "getaway car"). Plus, none of us in Eastern Queens Greenway have ever heard of criminals using the local Vanderbilt Motor Parkway as an escape route. Perhaps Paladino was trying to connect the (incorrect) ideas that both criminals and local cyclists are outsiders?
(If so, she should add her son, Thomas Paladino, to the list of the former: As Streetsblog reported, his fancy Aston Martin has ghost tags on it.)
Paladino also found grievance with the notion that anything good for cyclists is bad for car drivers, a common sociological condition that when a privileged class is asked to give up a tiny bit of privilege, it responds by claiming it is the oppressed class. "We use our cars here to go back and forth to school and do what we need to do. Bike lanes are not presently being used here. ... Why is it that bikers are the ones making the biggest stink, why is that ... because they seem to think they own the streets," she said.
A neighbor of ours sitting right next to Paladino told her he lives in her district and bikes on these lanes every day. Dozens of other people shared similar perspectives, prompting one person at the meeting put it, "What she was really saying was that no one who matters uses the bike lanes."
And what she was really saying is that only she and her supporters should be able to speak, even though multiple times she was yelling over the actual productive conversations that neighbors were having at their tables. She wanted to later claim that she was being silenced, which is why she interrupted the community input portion of the evening to demand that "everybody that is not actually interested in this [planning session] to leave now."
About half the room left en masse, the noise level dropped and we found the rest of the evening very productive.
Meanwhile, Paladino and her friends gathered in the parking lot, where she recorded a video for Facebook and Twitter talking about how "activists and lobbyists from outside the district more [sic] interested in bullying than listening to the people who actually live here."
We've never seen evidence of the conspiracy theory that people are flying in to pretend to be locals. Nor is it clear how close to the 16-mile proposed route Paladino believes one must live in order to express one's opinion at a planning workshop. How else besides bias — racial or otherwise — does Paladino know if someone is from the neighborhood?
Name-calling and Nativism
Her xenophobia was on display a week earlier during a City of Yes zoning hearing when questioned expert witness Jackson Chabot, a director at OpenPlans, "Where were you born?" Again, it is unclear how many years or generations someone needs to be a New York City resident before he or she is considered a New Yorker by Vickie Paladino.
At the bike lane meeting, Paladino said she gets things accomplished "by conversation, negotiation and knowledge," but there is no evidence of this. Rather, she has has a long history of simply disrupting or shifting conversations:
- She refused to disclose her vaccination status to the Council during COVID, calling it like "Nazi Germany" (after leading a no-mask conga line during quarantine).
- She was removed from the Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities and Addiction for saying "[p]rogressives may have no problem with child grooming and sexualization."
- She told New York University students, "The sad reality is that our schools are producing monsters, and it’s now our job to slay them. ... And the schools and faculty who sit at the top of this chaos must be razed along with them."
- She also insulted non-Europeans for their technological inferiority:
In addition to personal statements, Paladino seems to surrounds herself with similarly minded people:
- Thomas Paladino Jr., Paladino's chief strategist (and son), reportedly used the handle @agustus on the social media site Gab to speak about gunning down African-American U.S. Representative Maxine Waters. At the Greenway meeting, he started a verbal fight over pronouns on a woman's nametag, questioned attendees where they came from, and told people to "fuck off." In this video from the greenway event, he admits to flipping off a reporter and then claims he has the power to remove people from the meeting (though it appears he couldn't).
- Mario Nicoletto was Paladino's field director who supposedly used the slogan 1488, which references "Heil Hitler." According to the Daily News, Mario also supported Nick Fuentes (white supremacist and incel), called school shooting survivor David Hogg a "crisis actor," and publicly advocated for calling COVID-19 the "China Virus" at a time that Asian-American hate crimes were at a high, especially in Eastern Queens.
- According to Democrat Tony Avella (Paladino's political rival), Thomas Paladino was a member of the Proud Boys (a violent group that stormed the capital on Jan. 6) and that Paladino has posed with pictures of its members. An article from Gothamist suggests Vickie Paladino may have more direct ties:
The greenway conversation is currently not about neighbors who disagree on what route to take. This isn't even the normal (albeit just as fake) concerns about "the war on cars." This is a new situation where an organized group is suppressing dissent and actively trying to erase us from existence, both through their speech and through creating physically dangerous situations for us.
Is this the America you want to live in?
The final community feedback session for this round of planning will take place on Oct. 29 at 6 p.m. on Zoom. To give feedback, sign up here.
