<aside>
</aside>
Publication Date: November 19th, 2025
Image Remixed from The Economist.
<aside>
Hudson residents expected a quiet few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Instead, it got a political drama and uncertainty when a mayor refused to concede and lame-duck appointees try to rush through unwise actions. A simple budget meeting became the opening act of a full-blown Facebook spectacle, kicked off by outgoing Mayor Kamal Johnson as he stalled his concession and tried to rouse his base. His posts distorted facts, summoned an online mob, and escalated into direct physical threat of violence against the incoming Council President.
Much of the loudest outrage came not from ordinary residents but from non-resident insiders with jobs, influence, or funding tied to the current administration. Hudson is now confronting the cost of government by social media mob, where the final days of a lame-duck mayor turned into a three-act play of distraction, misinformation, and incitement. This was not an outlier event, but an oft repeated playbook leveraged to intimidate the Common Council and opponents into voting in favor of special interests over equal protection.
When Caitie Hilverman, long-time endorser of Kamal Johnson, downplayed the lack of decorum and combative, immature nature of former mayor Kamal’s first debate performance by saying “I don't mind debates getting scrappy,” she probably did not expect Hudson’s election results, or this last week’s Facebook kerfuffle. Kamal, in the week after losing the election and before conceding, called for a mob to besiege City Hall, evoking threats to “punch” the City’s newly elected lawmaker; “arrest” the City’s decades long news blogger; and the doxxing of private residents and bloggers. The fiasco ended with Tom DePietro, the outgoing Common Council President, labeling the views of Hudson liberals as those serving “white supremacy.”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! The preamble to this drama is simply this: it is all Kamal’s making.
For six years, Kamal refused to run the city’s basic machinery by failing to empower and instruct his Department heads to collect unpaid parking tickets and unpaid delinquent taxes. Indeed, between $250k to $500k in unpaid parking tickets sat untouched under Johnson, while millions of dollars delinquent property taxes accumulated in plain sight. In fact, Kamal admitted as a matter of City Hall policy at the first mayoral debate that he will not be collecting back taxes [see it for yourself at 52:57 timestamp here: https://www.youtube.com/live/RW49szL5WiE?t=3175s ]. What is more, Kamal directed his romantic partner and Housing Justice Director Michelle Tullo to lead Hudson’s Comprehensive Plan, which not only cost the City $225k, but also cannot be used due to statistical methods issues and a small sample. The Plan is now a document that does little more than serve as an expensive PDF monument to his unwillingness to manage details or insist on competent execution.
Incoming Common Council President Margaret Morris’ request for Department Heads to find wise ways to cut their budgets could have been avoided entirely by Kamal if he simply collected taxes and fees. Not only did the former Mayor create the problem, but he then openly lied about the problem, and then incited an online mob to attack the officials trying to fix it. Let’s dig in… ⤵️
A special budget meeting by the Common Council, on November 10th (and available here for all to see), included a straightforward request by incoming President Margaret Morris (not yet on the budget setting Board of Estimate and Apportions) to all Departments to find ways to cut their budgets in order to account for Hudson’s existing budget deficit. As noted above, this request could have been entirely avoided if Mayor Kamal had, in fact, practiced basic fiscal discipline.
<aside>
https://youtu.be/zD5vkjgWNwQ?si=pJdHBLr-E6nvnQoP ⏪
The calm before the storm…
</aside>
Within hours of the Common Council meeting, future Common Council President Margaret Morris and other long-time residents’ sensible statements were stripped of context, distorted, and fed into Facebook’s rumor mill by no other than Kamal Johnson.
The Big Lie: Screenshot from Kamal’s Facebook page dated November 10th, 2025
Importantly, this happened in the days between the moment it became clear that Kamal had lost the Mayoral race [which Common Sense tracked carefully here] and almost a week later when he finally conceded. Hudson found itself in the same suspended animation that the country has now seen in more than one recent national election, when an outgoing leader hesitates to accept the result, plays with media uncertainties and supporters’ emotions and fills the vacuum with noise. It is a familiar script. The officeholder, untethered from accountability yet still in command of a microphone, shifts from governing to agitation. Rumor takes the place of policy. Loyalists are encouraged to treat ordinary procedures as acts of sabotage. Calls that once belonged to national partisan rallies, including the 2016 era demand to “lock her up,” began to surface in local comment threads aimed at neighbors. In that short window, instead of tempering emotions, uniting and clarifying facts, the mayor stoked the crowd and egged on emotion with comments, likes, and doubling down on unwarranted accusations.
Read more here about how Kamal borrowed from a national-scale playbook:
Common Sense Editors are fervent supporters of the First Amendment, not as a slogan but as the cornerstone of a political order built on the idea that unwise speech is best countered by wiser, and more, speech, not by censorship. The United States has spent more than two centuries constructing the strongest free-speech protections of any democracy, and the Supreme Court has carved out only a narrow set of exceptions, the clearest of which involve direct, immediate incitement to violence. “Just Punch Her” may fall just short of the legal threshold, yet it gets uncomfortably close.
Long-time resident and respected lawyer, Kristal Heinz articulated this distinction better than anyone in the comment thread. When a supporter tried to excuse “Just punch her” as a joke, she noted that hateful words are the problem and that no reader can divine a benign tone from three sharp syllables. Her point underscored a basic constitutional truth. The First Amendment protects almost all speech, but it does not transform reckless language into responsible conduct. In a public forum, aimed at a public official, the line between protected expression and the rhetoric that corrodes civic life is defined not by legality but by judgment, and Kristal’s reply showed more of it than the mayor or his defenders.
The existence of a right does not guarantee the wisdom of exercising it. The role of public actors, like mayors, is to model restraint, especially when their supporters treat social media as a contact sport. That is why criticism from residents, editorial boards, and online commenters aimed at the mayor’s conduct belongs on the constitutionally protected side of the ledger. They are addressing what an elected official has done with public authority and public funds. That is precisely the kind of speech the First Amendment was designed to protect, given the long American memory of European and early American governments that once wielded “conspiracy” and “sedition” laws to silence legitimate scrutiny. Long-time African dictator Idi Amin once quipped “There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” Not in America.
The mayor’s response could not have been more different. Instead of answering those critiques with facts, he chose to post photographs of private residents who hold no office and committed no wrongdoing He also accused many residents of being “cry babies” — [see Box 1 in the footers for more]. Doxxing them was not illegal, but it was a revealing choice. It betrayed a view of leadership that confuses power with intimidation and treats ordinary citizens as acceptable collateral in a political quarrel. A city that wants better governance has every reason to reject that example, because a leader does not strengthen civic trust by aiming a digital crowd at the people he is meant to serve. To doxx a dissenter is to publish, in real time, one’s own preference for coercion over argument.
**Read more about Kamal’s doxxing, and a quick design note from Common Sense’s Editors for future doxxing reference:
<aside> 📍
Kristen Zanotelli, a straight shooter and proudly local Greenporter in person, loves to lament that Hudson residents and Joe Ferris are “not from Hudson,” and that “implants”, a novel neologism and play on “transplants” (non-Hudson residents who move here) are responsible for displacing original families. Ironically, Zanotelli herself does not reside in Hudson…
</aside>
A screenshot of Kamal’s comments on his own post, dated November 11th, 2025, calling for the arrest of Carole Osterink from the Gossips of Rivertown.
“Arrested” = “Lock Her Up”? The escalation did not end with insults. Kamal issued a call to arrest Carole, the mild-mannered long-time author behind The Gossips of Rivertown. The phrase is likely not accidental. It mirrors the political chant popularized in 2016 when crowds were urged to shout “lock her up,” in reference to Hillary Clinton and the so-called “email” scandal. That chant turned policy and political differences into criminal accusations, and converted disagreement into a public ritual of humiliation. Hudson saw the local version surface in real time.
This is part of the same divisional drift that produced the “punch her in the face” remark aimed at Margaret. It sits within a national climate where political violence has already taken real lives. The memories of Charlie Kirk and Minnesota’s Melissa and Mark Hortman linger as reminders of how quickly rhetoric hardens into threats and real violence. That is the country we are living in, which means calls to hit a council president or jail a local blogger are not jokes, but signals of a public that is starting to treat force and coercsion as a normal political tool. A responsible leader would step in and shut this down. Johnson fanned the sparks he started. His silence became permission.
13 years ago, the award-winning documentary, Two Square Miles, showcased a particular moment at a public hearing that took place in the auditorium of John L. Edwards when the late "Doc" Donahue, one of Hudson's most notorious good ole boys, questions the citizenship of Perry Cooney, Alana Hauptmann's late husband.
<aside>
To be precise, the questioning of Perry Cooney’s citizenship happens at around 49:08, as shown by the link below: ⏬
https://youtu.be/3aMHwyNu4Is?si=iBNsFK-yJINqKBex&t=2948
</aside>
This incident bears a striking resemblance to what transpired on Facebook mere days ago. Dorothy Heyl, wife of outgoing Common Council President Thomas DePietro, former **ExCo member of the Hudson City Democratic Committee,** and graduate from a Top 10 Law School commented in the midst of all this, asking “is he a U.S. citizen?” ⏬ Heyl has since deleted the comment (rightfully) and apologized privately. While our editors are all lawful immigrants, we appreciate the apology and correction on principle. Good on Dorothy.
Nevertheless, this points to a broader issue in Hudson’s discourse. The fact that an experienced New York attorney and active local politician reached for the same line of attack used by Elliott Matos, a community organizer from Catskill, proves the narrative violation of have vs. have nots, or transplants vs. locals. When identity becomes a weapon, everyone reaches for it, no matter their résumé.
<aside>
**Adolfo Lopez, Assistant Director of The Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood, in his own words** ⏬
Here are some of the things he had to say about Margaret:
“Get the picket signs ready for the reign of terror” as per a comment on Kamal’s November 11th, 2025 Facebook post
</aside>
The pattern fits neatly into a broader national trend. Across the country, questioning someone’s citizenship has become a reliable way to delegitimize a critic when you cannot win the argument. It requires no evidence, only insinuation, and it works by shifting the debate from ideas to belonging. Hudson, despite its size and location in New York State, is no exception. Dorothy Heyl’s “is he a U.S. citizen?” echoed a tactic used everywhere from school-board meetings to national campaigns: avoid engaging on the merit, and instead attack the passport.
That move is even harder to ignore in a city that prides itself on being “friendly and welcoming”. Hudson’s elected leaders routinely affirm that the city will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, and every major mayoral candidate this cycle (except one) ran on protecting immigrants. Against that backdrop, Heyl’s question, and Kamal Johnson’s attempt to cast Hugo as “Elon Musk 2.0,” land with a different weight. Both gestures tapped the same nativist instinct: frame a critic as an outsider and not “from here” to avoid engaging with what they actually said. It was the fastest route from civic disagreement to tribal reflex, and it exposed a hypocrisy the city’s political class would prefer to ignore.
Screenshot of a comment by Dorothy Heyl on a Facebook post by Kamal Johnson targeting one of the Common Sense editors, dated November 11th, 2025.
Around this time, on an episode of his radio show (bound by FCC rules, and usually recorded live from The Spark of Hudson), Tom DePietro offered a commentary that wandered into even stranger territory. The outgoing council president’s remarks reached their most curious point when he insisted that “Hudson liberals’ views serve white supremacy” and that the city is sliding toward becoming “either Rhinebeck or Provincetown,” a warning delivered with the gravity of someone describing Jim Crow South of the 1800 rather than two of the most reliably liberal towns in the American Northeast. The full transcript (available in the toggle below the voice clip) speaks for itself. After lamenting that Madison, Wisconsin, a city famous for progressive politics, had balked at an affordable-housing scheme, he pivoted into a long meditation on how NIMBY liberals should be told their positions have “a racial dimension” that, if taken seriously, would reveal that their views “serve white supremacy.” The conclusion is that Hudson risks transforming into places whose identities bear no resemblance to the caricature he was sketching.
Our Editors don’t quite know what to make of this… we have it on good authority that Provincetown is one of the country’s most prominent LGBTQ+ cultural centers, a bohemian enclave of drag shows, galleries, queer literary history, and theme weeks that draw visitors from around the world. Rhinebeck, meanwhile, sits near Hyde Park, where the Roosevelt estate and library continue to preserve the legacy of one of the most progressive presidents in American history. Both towns are decisively Democratic, deeply liberal, and boast virtually none of the historical markers associated with the Southern segregationist towns whose reputations the phrase “white supremacy” usually evokes. If the hood fits, it is not on them.
The economic logic is no sturdier. The notion that Hudson is populated by people “who couldn’t afford” Rhinebeck or Provincetown dissolves once you look at property-tax data. Hudson’s tax burden exceeds Provincetown’s and, depending on the parcel, can meet or surpass Rhinebeck’s. Rhinebeck’s higher taxes help fund a high-performing school system and a municipal culture that is broadly functional, including a council president who does not accuse entire wards of racial conspiracies. Hudson’s costs, by contrast, reflect less a premium on local excellence and more the accumulated inefficiencies of a city that has allowed its political debates to drift toward theatre.
What makes the episode stranger is that it was delivered by an elected official who began his monologue by declaring his distaste for NPR, only to adopt the very moral language he claimed to reject. “I don’t want to use the word racist,” he said, before proceeding to spend several minutes explaining that residents’ views “serve white supremacy.” If he meant to imply that Rhinebeck is a bastion of racial reaction, he will find few historians willing to join him. If he meant to suggest that Provincetown, a place whose identity rests on LGBTQ pride, migrant artists, and a long tradition of social experimentation, is somehow a synonym for white nationalist exclusion, the argument is even weaker.
E928CD64-4056-459E-918F-FAE5F670F75B.mov
<aside> 🇺🇸
</aside>
<aside> 📸
</aside>