Waite: Nelligan’s negligence underscores rot GOP doesn’t want to uncover

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WEIGHING IN – Last week, Schenectady City GOP Chairman and mayoral candidate Matt Nelligan said he “could not be prouder of our party and the progress it’s made.”

Those were his words in a statement announcing a ticket of four Republican Schenectady City Council candidates, whom Nelligan said would be “putting the nonsense aside and saving our city.”

Oh, how Nelligan is eating his words this week.

That’s after reporter Tyler A. McNeil unearthed a trove of nonsense and conspiratorial language posted to social media by the now-former Republican council candidate Jeff Moore. The posts show that Moore trafficked in conspiracy theories and harbored antisemitic-leaning sentiments.

In a particularly egregious example of Moore’s mindset, he wrote in February 2022 that “In the New Age of Communism, the ‘Toxic White Male’ is the new Jew.”

For Nelligan’s part, he immediately encouraged Moore to exit the race, which Moore did Tuesday just hours after learning McNeil had discovered the posts. Nelligan also strongly condemned the antisemitic messaging interspersed in Moore’s posts. The city GOP leader’s response demonstrates at least a passing interest in running a serious campaign based on policy and ideals – something to which I continue to believe Nelligan is committed.

The problem is our reporter, though he deserves plenty of praise for doing the digging others neglected, didn’t exactly have to go to unheard of lengths to dredge up Moore’s troubling posts. All he really had to do was scroll.

McNeil’s reporting proves what little vetting Nelligan did of the candidates he and the city’s GOP excitedly announced last week.

“We were unaware of the posts in question before we agreed to support him,” Nelligan said in a statement in response to a Gazette inquiry on Tuesday.

Unaware? I actually buy that. Nelligan likely knew if he looked too hard he was going to uncover something he didn’t want to find. That’s part of a problematic trend within the GOP right now, from Schenectady City Council up through the speakership of the U.S. House of Representatives. To have a real future, the Republican Party will have to exorcize its most toxic elements.

If we’re trying to understand how Nelligan could have supported Moore’s candidacy, consider that Schenectady’s Republican Party isn’t exactly thriving. As of Nov. 1, the state Board of Elections reported 16,573 active Democrats in Schenectady, 4,880 Republicans, 615 Conservatives, 379 Working Family Party members, 1,365 voters affiliated with another third party and 9,376 independent voters.

Nelligan has attempted to use current divides between progressives and moderates – and between white councilmembers and councilmembers of color – on the all-Democratic body to open up a lane for the GOP, which hasn’t had a sitting city representative since since 2005.

A tweet from the city GOP in late December said the party still needed candidates to fill out its slate, calling for Republican sympathizers to “get off the couch.”

Clearly, the city GOP wasn’t flush with people who wanted to run. So to some degree, Nelligan was forced to roll with who he had.

The problem is that Moore was one of the people to step up. And it’s hard to ignore how all of this fits into larger issues within the GOP.

As a result of Donald Trump and his embrace of conspiracy theories, his fraternizing with white nationalists and antisemites and his incessant shouting of extreme rhetoric, harmful ideas have wormed their way into the Republican base’s platform.

For instance, roughly 70% of Republicans still believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate, according to Poynter.

The megaphones given to this kind of ideology, through Trump and conservative media, is how you wind up with candidates like Moore, and it’s how you wind up with an extreme faction of the party wresting dangerous concessions from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which are now likely to threaten our government’s ability to function. It’s how you end up with known conspiracy theorists such as Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once removed from committee duties, being placed on the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over the border and may lead impeachment efforts of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The Moore controversy in Schenectady also can’t be entirely separated from the George Santos disaster, in which the Long Island Congressman was exposed as a complete fraud and pathological liar only after winning an election.

But the truth is that vetting isn’t happening because Republican leaders likely know the rot they’d find if they went digging. In many cases, hateful messaging isn’t even under the surface at all – it’s out in the open. Just listen to the words of the former president himself, who defended white nationalists in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters, and continually spewed racism when he referred to COVID-19 as the “China Virus.”

For Nelligan, this is an inflection point. I continue to believe he’s a serious guy with plenty of legitimate state-level GOP political experience. He can talk sensibly about populism and policing.

But he’s also been known to sound off senselessly, perhaps most notably calling Black Lives Matter “the official name of a radical Marxist organization,” when he demanded last summer that a BLM mural outside City Hall be removed.

With the surfacing of Moore’s posts, Nelligan must now look within himself and reflect on the kind of party leader he wants to be in Schenectady. He showed signs of promise by quickly distancing the party from Moore. But when Nelligan considers his own toxic rhetoric, he may not like what he finds.

Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.

Correction 1/25 11:38 a.m.: The City Republicans haven’t had a sitting representative on the Council since 2005. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave that year as the last time they won an election.

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