From: Genevieve Amedu
To: Alex Stillman; City Manager"s Office; Kimberley White; Meredith Matthews; Stacy Atkins-Salazar; Sarah Schaefer; Arcata Recreation Division; Rhea Varley; Tabatha Miller
Subject: Are you listening, mayor?
Date: Wednesday, November 5, 2025 12:43:18 PM
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Mayor Alex,
It’s what you were elected to do. No, not use your publicly elected office to mobilize and or empower the local segregationists, supremacists, genocidal Zionists and or rich interest groups to manufacture consent for violating your own social responsibility clause and assistance violating U.S. and international laws and civil society norms, e.g. the Foreign Assistance Act; the Arms Export Controls Act; the Leahy Laws; the Geneva Genocide Convention, (not comprehensive). Are you listening to ordinary People decoupled from power in your constituency? [begin excerpt of article by Ken Klippenstein]
Zohran Mamdani [the New York City mayoral race winner] won [last night] by literally meeting people where they’re at — in bodegas, subway stations, busy sidewalks, even at the New York Marathon. He met people on the streets, not to pitch them, but to listen and learn. These conversations informed his successful campaign more than his charm, social media prowess or any of the other superficial explanations major media are offering.
The focus on ordinary people was evident from the very start of his campaign. Last November, in one of his first campaign videos, Mamdani interviewed random passerby in Queens and the Bronx, simply asking about their concerns. They identified the unglamorous but urgent day-to-day issues that would become the focus of his campaign: the cost of living, childcare, housing, and transportation.
The video stood out from usual campaign content in how little of it focused on the [politician]. He didn’t “approve this message.” There were no gotchas, no fact checking his opponents, no issue-oriented rejoinders. Virtually every shot focused on the interviewee rather than [mayoral candidate] Mamdani, whose face you could not even see at times. He just stood there, quietly listening to what people had to say. …
People’s comments were insightful for anyone who cared to listen. They were the message. “If you’re speaking the things that people want to hear about, I don’t care what color you are, I’ll vote for you,” as one woman told him.
Mamdani ran a hyper-local campaign that avoided the Washington approach favored by campaign advisors and consultants. He did not try to graft his election onto the national partisan environment, avoiding the usual soaring rhetoric about freedom and democracy, the soul of America, blah, blah, blah.
During the primary debate when candidates were asked about what foreign country they would first visit as mayor, Mamdani stood out for being the only candidate who didn’t say “Israel” — or any country at all. “I would stay in New York City,” Mamdani said. “My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on them.”
There was also none of the usual aversion to unscripted interactions with the public or on uncomfortable issues that is symptomatic of a distrust of the people. He said what he thought, even on hot button issues like Gaza, [Palestine] which stood out against a see of other politicians clearly terrified of addressing such matters.
Mamdani would often quote former New York mayor Ed Koch’s saying, “If you agree with me on nine out of 12 issues, vote for me; if you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.” This speaks to his trust that people are intelligent enough to handle disagreement, contrary to the typical politician approach of avoiding conflict at all costs, fence-sitting on contentious issues, and the like. (Consider Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s refusal yesterday to say which mayoral candidate he voted for.) Mamdani decried the lack of respect for voters in his victory speech last night. “You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership,” he said.
Another campaign video featured Mamdani speaking to Halal food truck vendors, virtually ubiquitous throughout the city. A pressing issue but one not obvious to people outside of New York (including myself) was why these Halal vendors’ food had suddenly become so expensive. City regulations and other forms of needless bureaucracy, he was told. He promised to get to the bottom of it. His enthusiasm about what might seem like a minor issue was endearing to people and signaled that he was paying attention.
Above all, Mamdani’s campaign was a rejection of what seems to have become the bunker strategy of others:
where candidate hide from voters, limit interviews, and rule from “the room where it happens.” “We’re outside, because New Yorkers deserve a mayor that they can see, they can hear, they can even yell at,” Mamdani said in a video recording of him running in the New York Marathon posted to social media.
As Mamdani sees it, facing the public, even if it might heckle you, is part of the job of being an elected official.
Obvious as this may seem, it is a more genuine and humble attitude ofthe Washington national figures who believe that their role as philosopher kings is to reign over and above the public.
It’s amazing anyone still thinks there’s some inherent dignity to elected office after Donald Trump, not after President Trump’s convictions (the legal ones, that is), or, say, his latest AI video depicting him manning a fighter jet dropping poop on No Kings protesters. Or Biden sundowning at the presidential debate last year (“We finally beat Medicare!”) Or eight sitting members of Congress having died in office since 2022. [or after Mayor Alex Stillman is caught on a hot mic decrying having to listen to constituents and or; after mayor Stillman alerted the Arcata police force, which she oversees, to surveil local Palestinian children where she couldn’t prevent them from participating in public life as they made art in the Arcata Plaza to honor killed Palestinian children]
….
Social media, especially short video, certainly played an important role in Mamdani’s victory. But the reason so much of his content went viral was because of its focus on ordinary people. This point gets lost in a lot of the major media coverage, which is looking for any way it can downplay the profoundly important role of the public and of populism to Zohran Mamdani’s success.
….
Mamdani’s magic is his understanding that the masses are the message. His victory speech spotlighted everyday workers from warehouse workers to cooks, demanding that they be allowed to hold power, too:
“For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected, that power does not belong in their hands. Fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor. Palms callous from delivery. Bike handlebar knuckles scarred with kitchen burns.
These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power, and yet over the last 12 months you have dared to reach for something greater tonight. Against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands.” [end excerpt of this morning’s article by Ken Klippenstein] My message to you, Arcata mayor and city council members, begins here.
Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy focused on affordability and delivering on the material needs of ordinary people in addition to making government accountable to the people it serves:
-Rent-freezes (housing)
-Fare-free buses
-Universal childcare
-Ending the price-gouging of groceries
Concerns that came straight from the People were centered after Mamdani centered LISTENING TO THE PEOPLE. Ending the funding of genocide, embracing BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) an arms embargo as well as voicing commitment to uphold U.S. and international law, by arresting israeli regime prime minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York given he is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC), for instance, and taxing the Billionaires is the straightforward way Mamdani proposed to achieve these objectives.
Mayor Alex Stillman, the contrast occurs to me as clear between a mayor championed by the People because Mamdani championed their day-to-day concerns —and—your deference to, where not outright coordination with, the local racist, bigoted supremacists to help obstruct disrupting apartheid and genocide, fueling anti-Palestinian racism (APR) and anti-Islam bigotry including helping efforts to keep my three Palestinian children out of the Arcata Plaza while making art for Palestinian children killed by the apartheid regime, while also capitulating to forprofit-power rather than immediately and consistently easing imposed conditions of immiseration for our vulnerable community members here. The contrast is clear where a NYC mayoral candidate attunes to the people’s concerns while you minimize and reduce people’s role in your governing by limiting the public’s comment time and now aiming to shut out a portion of your constituency’s voices by taking away public comment via phone and or zoom altogether.
(Not that your excuse is taken in good faith after two years engaging you shows that unrealistic, however. Have you heard of ?)
Where any of this is true —I acknowledge that I only know what I know— how entitled, corrupt, abusive and “Cuomo” (old guard) of you.
I am reminded that you early on gave the impression, mayor Alex, that you don’t count listening to the people you were elected to serve as your responsibility let alone the central point of your job when your hot mic picked up the following comment from you.
"I wish I had my computer so l could scroll around like you do and not have to listen to all this stuff." -Arcata Mayor Alex Stillman, on a hit mic at the end of the Dec 04, 2024 city council meeting in which the violent arrest of a Black Cal Poly Humboldt student in the Arcata Plaza was a central theme of the public comment period.
Please know that enabling the fomenting of racism, bigotry and incitement to genocide is not a legitimate way of governing and; it is ordinary people (decoupled from the converging interests and powers benefitting from such fear-mongering, racist hate and violence) who actually matter, Alex.
Meanwhile, NYC mayor-elect Mamdani says to his constituency:
“This power, it’s yours.”
Regarding ending remote public comments
You appear to pretend to trivialize and sideline the central issue of our time —ending a U.S. tax-payer-funded-andarmed (via tax-payer subsidization of the arms industry) live-streamed holocaust via ending investment in and profiting from it— by referencing the “local issues” that you’ve purposefully neglected to deliver on because you serve wealth and power, neglect to local issues and material needs from which you’ve aimed to distract us, specifically using local bastions of racism and bigotry to keep apartheid and genocide going strong for the profiteers of these anti-human, anti-earth crimes, industrial scale violence which impacts every single person in Arcata given we are all human earthlings where we’re not all tax-payers!
IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
The Military Industrial Media complex is the number one purveyor of global climate catastrophe and you know it because we the public have told you, Alex, paired with providing you the data repeatedly in our demand for divestment, which you refuse, and; now you maneuver to silence us because of your refusal to be part of the solution. It is absolutely city business across every local government in these Unites States on stolen native land to stop funding, arming and profiting from a holocaust as your constituents have consistently voiced to you in Arcata city council chambers during public comment period including by remote phone and or zoom.
Mamdani: “Toni Morrison said that the function of racism is distraction. So much of the unabashed bigotry [coming from mayoral candidates] is a reflection of their own recognition that they do not have a plan [to solve local issues in service of ordinary local people].”
Mayor Alex—
You appear not to want to hear your constituents anymore because you don’t have the political will to do the job of honoring your social responsibility clause by cutting ties with apartheid as you sow seeds of racial segregation here in Arcata! But, the elected politician is not the decider of the agenda as We the People are whom city government is responsible for serving…by way of LISTENING.
Speaking of “focus on local issues”.
Due to conflicts of interest from you being the owner class and landlord, Alex, you aren’t even permitted to vote on some key local initiatives!
Mayor,
Divest from settler colonial occupation, apartheid and genocide and the permanent earth-poisoning U.S. tax-payer funded war economy. Expand public comment in the People’s chamber; don’t limit or take it away on the phone and or Zoom, which the public relies on to participate in democracy. Deliver on the material needs of the most ripped off and vulnerable in Arcata.
Or, RESIGN.
You serve the People; we don’t serve your self-referential interests and preferences to “scroll” on your laptop instead of listen to us in the People’s chamber, Alex.
Sincerely,
Genevieve Ameduri
Arcata resident and homeowner
Divest! Deliver on local material human needs not profit! [attached screenshots may appear out of order]