New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s new COVID rule change is “garbage” that she “made up out of thin air,” City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R) told the Todd Starnes Show Monday.
As Hochul changes COVID protocols to meet staffing shortages, Borelli warns that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s base is pushing for “more restrictions” and creating two classes of people.
“The governor, for example, Kathy Hochul, our new governor, just announced that quarantining is five days if you are a special, really important person with an essential job. Quarantining is still required 10 days if you are anyone else,” Borelli explained.
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“Now anyone with a basic education can see this is totally just B.S. to use a really plain English way of saying it. This is garbage. This is just made up out of thin air,” Borelli said. “And the result is regular people, I think more than before are tuning in to see the inefficiency and inefficacy of the restrictions we’ve put in place.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH JOE BORELLI ON THE TODDCAST PODCAST:
Below is a rushed transcript from Joe Borelli’s interview on the Todd Starnes Radio Show:
Starnes: [01:18:31] Right now in New York City, though, some of the or not some the strictest China virus policies are now in effect. And I want to go to the Patriot Mobile newsmaker line. Great to have with us the minority leader in the New York City Council. Our good friend Joe Borelli. Joe, good to have you back with us. [01:18:49][18.4]
Borelli: [01:18:50] Oh, Todd, great to hear you’re back in the hot seat. Thank you for having me. [01:18:52][2.4]
Starnes: [01:18:53] Absolutely. All right. What’s going on now? What are you guys facing there in the Big Apple? [01:18:58][5.3]
Borelli: [01:18:59] Well, I think we’ve got to be clear about this. We’re seeing some of the most heavily vaccinated neighborhoods with the highest vaccination rates of all are now seeing the largest spike in Omicron cases of anywhere in the country, let alone anywhere in the state. And thankfully, we are not seeing the correlation in hospitalizations and certainly not the correlations in deaths. Although there is a slight tick in hospitalizations, but nowhere near the level we saw last winter when Delta and other waves kind of came through and did have an impact on our hospital abilities. [01:19:33][33.6]
Starnes: [01:19:34] Joe, what are what are the average citizens of New York going to face with these new mandates, which we understand are with the worst in the country? [01:19:42][7.6]
Borelli: [01:19:43] Yes as of today? Today starts, the private sector mandates something that the mayor of the City of New York has absolutely no authority to do. Look, Todd, we can argue whether the mandates are right or wrong. But if you’re a governor of your state and your state legislature passed vaccine mandates, they are the law of the land. That’s not what’s happening in New York City right now. In New York City, you have the mayor who’s got literally three days left of work before he goes off into the sunset of his progressive, utopian retirement. But Bill de Blasio mandated that private sector employees will have to be vaccinated starting today. Again, this is something that’s unprecedented, and it’s something that even he believes he’s not sure whether he has the constitutional authority to do but is doing it nonetheless. And it just assumes that he’ll get taken to court. And maybe he’ll lose where we’re at today. [01:20:34][50.4]
Starnes: [01:20:34] I’m curious, Joe, now you’re you’re over in Staten Island. Is that right? [01:20:37][2.9]
Borelli: [01:20:38] Correct. [01:20:38][0.0]
Starnes: [01:20:39] Now I tell people that most of the Conservatives are either in Bay Ridge, Staten Island. There were three exactly when I lived in downtown Brooklyn. So, you know, it’s a it’s a pretty liberal area. But the reality is, Joe, a lot of liberals are now starting to come around to the conservative way of thinking on these ideas. What are you hearing from your constituents there? [01:20:59][20.6]
Borelli: [01:21:00] Well, well, people are seeing this wave as sort of a blue wave of COVID, where now if you listen to politicos on TV and in other media outlets, suddenly it’s OK to have COVID. We shouldn’t be shaming people who got COVID, because now it’s people who get all the quote unquote right things to people who are masking the people who are yelling at you for not wearing a mask. The people who are triple vaccinated, those are the people. Unfortunately, seeing the spike in COVID, thankfully, I don’t root against them. I don’t want people to get sicker. Thankfully, they’re not getting as sick as in the previous wave. But now suddenly the basically the scales are all even now where whether you’re vaccinated or wearing a mask. Everyone seems to be coming down with the number of cases, I have to be honest. The number of cases is alarming. I was online. I took a test. Today, I have to wait for the results tomorrow. My father, who tested positive today, other relatives tested positive today. So it really is an astonishing number of COVID cases when you see the chart online, when you when you look up the case chart for New York state. It is an incredible rise in cases and we are certainly seeing that. But thankfully it is not of the dangerous hospitalization and deadly variant. [01:22:09][69.4]
Starnes: [01:22:10] But isn’t it possible that I mean, I’m just wondering if anybody there is stepping back and saying, wait a second, we have the strictest policies in all of America, and yet we still had these significantly high numbers of people that are testing positive. Maybe, just maybe this is not working out. [01:22:27][16.7]
Borelli: [01:22:28] That would take a level of self-awareness that is unable to be seen by people like Bill de Blasio in some of the more radical progressives in the city. I mean, these are people who are still cheering on the de Blasio mandate. They’re aware that he doesn’t have the authority to do this and yet his political base. You live in downtown Brooklyn, so just imagine the people you live with the hipsters, the yuppies, the these upper class white people who form the base of political bill de Blasio’s politics are all cheering him on and they’re saying, we need more restrictions, more everything, not less. When you get outside of sort of hipster Brooklyn, when you go into the other outer boroughs where there’s regular people, be they black or white or brown or Indian or anything, those people are the ones questioning whether all this restrictions and mandates have been worth it. These are the people that had to go in and be the hotel doormen, the cleaning ladies, the police officers, the firemen. They didn’t, you know, survive the pandemic in their pajamas, watching Netflix zooming to work. So, so you are seeing now almost a class difference in the response at this stage of the pandemic, where regular folks are really questioning why their kid wasn’t in school for a year, why their teachers don’t have to come in to teach their kids why some jobs have some sets of rules, but not others. The governor, for example, Kathy Hochul, our new governor, just announced that quarantining is five days if you are a special, really important person with an essential job. Quarantining is still required 10 days if you are anyone else. Now anyone with a basic education can see this is totally just B.S. they used a really plain English way of saying it. This is garbage. This is just made up out of thin air. And the result is regular people, I think more than before are tuning in to see the inefficiency and inefficacy of the restrictions we’ve put in place. [01:24:23][114.4]
Starnes: [01:24:23] On the Patriot Mobile newsmaker line. Our good friend, New York City Councilman Joe Borelli. You know, to your point, Joe, when the the pandemic first broke out, I was living in one of the new high rises. They’re down on Flatbush, the one that had the the Target and the Trader Joe’s like in the first couple of floors. So I go downstairs. It was freezing cold. It’s like a January line around the building, people waiting to get into the Trader Joe’s. So I walked down to the local regular people supermarket. The associated grocers walked in. Nobody’s there. Get my provisions and I’m talking to the manager and he was like, Look at those idiots out there all day. If they want to get there, you know their avocados, they could go to a regular market, but they don’t want that. They got to have the organic stuff from Trader Joe’s. [01:25:07][43.5]
Borelli: [01:25:08] Well, you’re seeing that right now as we speak with respect to the lines at testing sites. If you go on the government website and want the government’s free test, you’ll wait online outside for two hours, three hours. If you’re like most normal people who have a doctor or have an ability to just Google and search for things, you can go to a private health care provider, pay like a $10 co-payment and not stand in the freezing cold like an idiot. But again, you know, I can’t account for four New Yorkers’ stupidity when it comes to me, because these are people who are still insisting that we do the same things that just have not worked one time. These aren’t things that worked for the most part, right? We’re not talking about restrictions that that that we can hedge and say they worked a lot. They worked well, they’ve worked somewhat good. These are things that didn’t work at all. And now they’re still calling for the continuation of these mandated restrictions. [01:25:59][50.6]
Starnes: [01:26:00] Joe, real quick. Here he is. They they got rid of the statue of Thomas Jefferson there, and you’re in the council chamber. Have they put anything up? Are they going to replace Thomas Jefferson? [01:26:10][9.5]
Borelli: [01:26:11] No. It’s so funny, too, because Thomas Jefferson stood next to a painting of George Washington, who was also a slave owner, and he actually stood under the quote that’s actually painted onto the ceiling of quote by Thomas Jefferson. So these people were all about just symbolism and just putting on a show and making a political point. They weren’t really offended by Thomas Jefferson at all. And that’s the part that I really get most upset about. If someone’s really upset about something, if you really can’t get past it in your day, I mean, maybe let’s talk about it. But these are people who just did this because they want to erase history. They want to get political points from the far left for doing stuff like this. And now we have an empty space where Thomas Jefferson once that. [01:26:53][41.6]
Starnes: [01:26:54] I know that Eric Adams, he’s a Democrat on the other side of the aisle. Are you hopeful that he’s going to be able to fix some of the problems that at least with the police? [01:27:01][7.6]
Borelli: [01:27:03] I am. I mean, he hasn’t even been elected yet, and he said, we’re going to bring back solitary confinement to our jails. You know, if you slash another inmate, if you slash a correctional officer, you’re going to end up in solitary confinement. This is something that is probably normal in the rest of the country. But in New York, the suggestion that we return solitary confinement is like overturning the world that we know. So I give him a lot of credit for saying something as Bulger’s that on day one. And if we have to go back to fighting about soda bans and plastic straws and all that other silly stuff because he is a progressive Democrat. But we have a safe city because he understands that we do need to have police. We do need to have to have to have accountability. We do need to get rid of bail reform. I’ll take that trade today and I’ll say as many nice things as I possibly can about it. And again, we’ll go back to fighting about plastic straws. So I am optimistic and I’m hopeful. [01:27:52][49.4]
Starnes: [01:27:53] I like that. I’ve got to tell you, Joe, I miss. I do miss some things about Brooklyn. You can’t find a good slice in Memphis where I’m from. It is what it is, and I really miss defined ties down over and Red Hook. [01:28:05][12.0]
Borelli: [01:28:05] Yes, sir. That is one of the best. And you’re right. I mean, if it wasn’t for the restaurants, there would be a lot less reasons to live in New York, and Brooklyn is blessed. [01:28:14][8.3]
Starnes: [01:28:14] Brooklyn is certainly yes, they are. All right, Joe. Always good. We appreciate your great insight there into what’s happening in a New York City politics. And let’s wish the mayor good luck. [01:28:23][9.1]
Borelli: [01:28:24] Thank you and happy New Year! [01:28:25][1.2]