How is it that Hudson has been hit by yet another “tempest in a teacup” that distracts from real municipal malfeasance? And how to move beyond the non-resident fueled drama, slander and libel, and corrupt not-for-profit political operatives who profit from dysfunction
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Publication Date: March 4th, 2026
Image creatively remixed from the Economist, and sporting our new brand colors.
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Before diving into the latest manufactured outrage, we must establish the underlying motive driving it: pure, unadulterated political retribution by ballot box losers.
The individuals orchestrating the latest digital circus are allies of the discredited **Hudson/Catskill Housing Coalition (HCHC)** and the Working Families Party (WFP). Just months ago, their hand-picked candidates were absolutely decimated at the polls in their primary races against mainstream Democrats. This was only the second time in living memory that the elected mayor was not a local high school graduate, and all local “community organizers” and “activists” in competitive races lost.
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In case you missed it, read the (devastating to some) election coverage here:
Unable to win at the ballot box, this defeated political machine has turned to the digital fever swamps to subvert the democratic will of Hudson's voters.
But back to the “Tempest in the Teacup”…
When our editors started receiving phone calls from area bloggers and regional newspapers about a "Common Council incident," we assumed the other shoe had finally dropped. We thought it was only a matter of time until someone connected the dots and figured out a sitting Common Council member's family was arrested for illegal gun possession, while evading police on city streets, and caught up in other New York State police actions.
Or, just maybe, the District Attorney had finally started investigating the Hudson Roots program, allegedly used to pay political workers and allies for the former mayor while being managed by his romantic partner in City Hall, or maybe the potential pay to play scheme and the judge sealed lawsuit quietly filed between the Galvan Foundation’s expensive attorneys in Albany and the new straight and narrow County DA was finally unsealed.
But no. None of these actual, tangible scandals or questions of hypocrisy broke into the open.
The famous Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift wrote: "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it." Over the centuries, preachers, politicians, and writers kept remixing the phrasing, adding boots, shoes, and eventually pants, until it evolved into the modern versions we use today.
Instead, certain convicted criminals from Albany and recently unemployed Greenport residents were busy trying to frame a minor public parking incident, the fender bender where no fender was bent, into a fabricated crisis of “parking under the influence,” at noon no less. The primary architects of this noise, former Mayor Kamal Johnson, former Common Council member Quintin Cross, and Greenport resident Kristen Zanotelli, operate as a digital mob. They were quickly joined by Elliot Matos from Catskill (COO of the **Hudson/Catskill Housing Coalition (HCHC)** and now Village of Catskill appointed Planning Board member), former Common Council member Tiffany Garriga, and even Claire Cousin, a former board member of the Hudson/Catskill Housing Coalition and current 5th Ward Common Council member.
A screenshot of 5th Ward CC member Claire Cousin’s Facebook post, calling on Morris for transparency after invoking buzzwords like “community” and (ironically) touching on serving residents. Cousin has never won a contested election, and did not comment on former Mayor Kamal’s Rent Scandal, or call on former Common Council President DePietro to resign after he physically assaulted a resident.
It was less a coordinated hit job and more a deeply humiliating (to Quintin Cross and game of Six Degrees of HCHC), executed by the kind of amateurs who think "media strategy" means cold-calling journalists for weeks and praying something sticks. When the press corps inevitably left them on read, they pivoted to Plan B: an anonymous Instagram account boasting the kind of suspiciously polished visuals they teach at Kite’s Nest summer activist camp.
Two weeks later, when the algorithmic revolution failed to materialize, they finally just Leroy Jenkins’d the whole thing.
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https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeroy_Jenkins
Watch one of the most famous memes of all time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLyOj_QD4a4
For those needing more explanation: Quintin Cross is the Leeroy Jenkins of this story, and the nerds are the behind the scenes 7th generation social justice warriors who make careful plans and then it all goes bust when Cross acts out, which he is always want to do.
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Operating with all the subtlety and grace of an untrained, unpaid North Korean media desk, they flooded the zone. The resulting campaign of slander and dishonest framing was so catastrophically botched that it achieved the impossible: pitting Jeffrey Yeh against Kamal, putting Yeh and Gossips on the same side of an issue, and forcing on residents a full-body wince of third-degree secondhand embarrassment. Never in one day did so many people reveal their character and lack of understanding about how the world works, at least since a local Substacker asked residents to sell their homes below market price, and mostly to “people of color”.
The digital exhaust tells an even less flattering story. The same hands that ran last year’s supposedly “independent” pro-Kamal Instagram campaigns appear to have been behind this smear as well… same style, same editing tools and tags. It’s 2026… If you’re going to coordinate influence operations, at least graduate from bargain-bin Canva presets and open Figma before pretending this is organic.
A screenshot of the anonymous Instagram account in question, “Hudson Uncovered,” slandering Margaret Morris.
Honestly, if these clowns ever had to spar with actual professionals, they might learn a thing or two about basic digital hygiene, not to mention libel laws. They might, for instance, use tools that don't leave pigment trails leading our editors directly to their behind the scenes helpers. Or, at the absolute bare minimum, they’d know to age their burner accounts for a year before deploying them for a sloppy false flag op. If they actually ever commit a crime again they just laid the crumbs for the feds to connect them all in a civil or criminal conspiracy.
But we digress.
In the screenshots below, you can see Johnson, Zanotelli, Cross, Cousin, and others chiming in, reminding credible employers to avoid them, and acting with the confidence of retired men who have millions in savings, no mortgage, and more lawyers on retainer than media subscriptions. Except these guys do not.
Screenshot from the Facebook (Mob) Commentary this last week.
Screenshot from the Facebook (Mob) Commentary this last week.
Screenshot from the Facebook (Mob) Commentary this last week.
Common Council members suggested that this was a calculated ploy to undermine the upcoming Short-Term Rental (STR) vote at City Hall.
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The Gossips of Rivertown covers said STR vote in detail here ⬇️
https://gossipsofrivertown.blogspot.com/2026/02/much-ado-about-very-little.html
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The record and history books will show: The recent digital accusations leveled against the Common Council President Margaret Morris, and by extension the Hudson Police Department, as well as the District Attorney, and before that former mayoral candidate Peter Spear, are unequivocally, demonstrably false. They are manufactured fictions designed to weaponize identity and slander political opponents.
If FB Mob Episode I: Kamal's Youth Center Lies (the late 2025 incident where Margaret Morris and others were threatened with physical violence over the Youth Center) was the original franchise film, and the attack on Peter Spear was The Prequel FB Mob: Peter Spear falsely accused of racism, then this current circus is the sequel, FB Mob Episode II (the sequel): the case of the fender bender that was not bent or scratched. And as we all know, aside from The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), any movie sequel made this millennium is pure trash. Coming soon, to a screen near you in March or April: FB Mob Episode III (title forthcoming).
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Read our detailed Special Report on FB Mob, Episode I, here. Special Report: Curtain Call on Kamal’s FB Mob Playbook
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Before reading the hysterical Facebook fiction, here is the unvarnished reality of what transpired. A Common Council member parked on an icy patch in a parking lot directly abutting one of Hudson's older and frail buildings, hitting (softly or forcefully?), certainly accidentally, a building directly abutting the public parking lot. Her fender bender, as confirmed by HPD, eyewitnesses, a local video by the store manager himself, and her insurance, shows virtually no evidence of damage, and then the council member proceeded, in the freezing cold and on ice, to meet a friend for coffee around noon. Police body camera footage, breathlessly shared by Quintin Cross and Zanotelli, show polite and professional HPD officers following protocol and mediating an exchange of insurance information before writing up a report.
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The Times Union also reported on the situation, which you can read here: ⬇️
https://www.timesunion.com/hudsonvalley/news/article/margaret-morris-crash-hudson-shop-21952775.php
Bottom = laptop sized damage area. Top = laptop store sized tarp cover up?
The Times Union story visually amplifies the damage by presenting a straight-on image that makes the hole appear significantly larger than the original alleged scrape. The framing, timing, and presentation suggests extensive impact rather than a limited siding break.
Top: The image circulated after the Hudson media sensation machine went into full drive: photographed approximately a week later and framed head-on to maximize perceived scale.
Bottom: The original alleged scrape: photographed within 24 hours by a digital forensics expert. This image captures the immediate condition of the siding: a localized break, limited in scope, which may or may not have predated Morris touching the building.
What began as a minor scrape was reframed into a narrative of major structural damage. Same wall, but with different timing, framing, and story.
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This tactic of manufacturing outrage to neutralize political opponents is the established playbook of this defeated machine. One need only look back at the incident involving former mayoral candidate Peter Spear. When Spear made a perfectly reasonable, analytical observation, mostly in jest, noting the political and demographic resemblances between the New York City mayoral race and the City of Hudson mayoral race, he was immediately besieged by this exact same cast of characters.
Rather than debate his premise on its merits, the mob baselessly and falsely accused him of racism. It is a chillingly effective strategy: when you cannot win on policy, weaponize identity and shout down your opponent with the most severe societal labels available. It’s like the 2010- 2024 College campus culture wars before they re-instituted SAT tests as part of the admission criteria. The completely untrue smears against Spear, who had the courage to call out fraud and the chutzpah to dream of a better Future Hudson, were merely the test run for the hysteria now being directed at Morris, and maybe soon, you, dear reader… and certainly at Mayor Ferris before next summer. To Spears' credit, he took the high road. He was eventually appointed to the Planning Board by now-Mayor Joe Ferris, and he is remembered today for running a campaign defined by principle, media experimentation, and truth-speaking, pioneering the Alley Chat format.
Many residents speculate aloud that Spear would have been Mayor, were it not for his principled stance to run as an independent, in a town controlled by Democrats.
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Bear in mind, this mob consists of a half-dozen mainly Greenport, Catskill, and Albany residents who are used to treating Hudson as their personal political stage, alongside a half-dozen current or former Common Council members with histories of local corruption. Put simply, more residents go to the Hudson Dog Park on a daily basis than the number of actual City of Hudson residents who engage in these Facebook mobs.
(to adjust his bar for putting others on the spot to comment 😉):
Before we entertain fake crises, and ask innocent leaders to comment when convicted criminals spend two weeks on a smear and influence campaign, it might be helpful to review actual, recent scandals involving city officials and activists.
Notably, only one of the following confirmed events resulted in apologies from the progressive establishment or unified calls for resignation.
While Quinton Cross currently spends his days spreading videos of a parked car on an icy street, Hudson’s memory isn’t as short as he’d like. In 2012, Cross didn't just "witness" a scene; he was the lead actor in a criminal saga that rocked the city.
Cross was caught on security footage orchestrating a literal break-in at City Hall. This wasn't a misunderstanding; it was a premeditated violation of the public’s trust and property. While he now plays the role of a concerned citizen with a smartphone, the records tell a different story: one of a man who treated the seat of government like his personal piggy bank.