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If You Don't Like Socialism or the Establishment, Curtis Sliwa Wants Your Vote
Curtis Sliwa became famous by stepping in where the government was falling short. As the New York mayoral candidate told Reason's Jesse Walker, the Guardian Angels—the anti-crime patrols that Sliwa launched in New York City in 1979—were born because "the government completely failed us….We filled the gap."
In the years since then, Sliwa has expanded the Guardian Angels to cities around the world, launched a multidecade career in talk radio, confessed that some of his organization's early crime-fighting exploits were hoaxes, and survived a very real assassination attempt allegedly ordered by the Gotti family. Now he's aiming to be mayor, running both as a Republican and on an independent Protect Animals ballot line against the self-described socialist Zohran Mamdani, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and the scandal-plagued incumbent, Eric Adams.
Sliwa's thoughts don't always follow predictable lines. On immigration, he cheers crackdowns on "the bad hombres, the drug dealers, [and] the gangbangers" but warns that "everybody should be afforded due process….You don't just pick them up, put them on Air Con, and take them to that gulag in El Salvador. That's not the American way." He shrugs at market solutions for housing—"I don't trust the developers, I don't trust the realtors"—while blasting the city for mothballing thousands of public apartments. He thinks marijuana should be legal and fast food should be more tightly regulated. He's fine with President Donald Trump sending the National Guard to police D.C., but "if he would've tried to do it in New York City, I'd say, 'Whoa.'"
Walker interviewed Sliwa twice in August for a Reason profile—once while Sliwa was campaigning on the subway and in East Harlem, and once in the Manhattan building that houses the candidate's campaign HQ. This is the second of those conversations.
Transcript
This interview is edited for style and clarity.
Jesse Walker: You're listening to Reason. My name is Jesse Walker. Our guest today is the founder of one of the best-known organizations of crime-watching citizen patrols, the Guardian Angels. He's also a long-time veteran of AM talk radio, and now he's the Republican nominee to be mayor of New York City. So Curtis Sliwa, thank you for joining us.
Curtis Sliwa: My pleasure. And let's not forget the first ever independent line Protect Animals, no-kill shelters.
That's coming up later in the interview. But yes, you're also running as the Protect Animals candidate.
One reason it's been especially interesting to watch you run a political campaign is because for a lot of your career, and especially at the very beginning, you felt like an almost anti-political figure. In 1981, you told High Times magazine, "I can have more of an effect on a person's day-to-day life, through the patrols, than I could as governor." You said, "I'm into getting people to do things for themselves, purely and simply." So tell me what's changed, in the world or in you or in both, that's led you to think, in fact, now you can have an effect in office—maybe not as governor, but as mayor.
Having been a student and watching the body politic from the outside first. When I started the Guardian Angels, government completely failed us. We were at the point in New York City, we
Published on 5 days, 18 hours ago