You might want to quarrel about how much each of these characters is really from Queens before comparing their style.
I think the one who most deserves the "from Queens" designation is Mamdani, even though he was born in Uganda.
Feel free to read my chat with Grok — which includes details about the connections each of the 3 has to Queens, an effort to describe what distinguishes the people of Queens, and a search for other celebrities who might be quintessentially Queens — here.
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43 comments:
I was born and bred in Queens. AOC is most decidedly not from Queens. Mamdani can lay claim to being from Queens because there are a lot of immigrants who first settle there. I once heard that every language on the planet was spoken in Queens. Trump - he is from Queens. I knew many, many people with that bluster in my years growing up there.
Sandy "Wind Tunnel" Cortez is from Queens about as much as Jasmine "Ratchet" Crockett is from the ghetto. Change my mind.
AOC got elected because, despite her stand on the issues, she has the greatest set of tits in all of the Congress.
The Bronx, in one word, is best summarized with "toymerl."
At least we don't have any kings.
Tank is originally from Queens. Just around the corner from Shea Stadium, except it was built after we moved.
Kevin James, who played the King of Queens, is from Mineola.
Queens = Middle of the NYC power hierarchy, and more perspective on the city than most?
Manhattan = Fixated on money and lifestyle above all else. Blinded by the lights.
Staten Island = Where do you live? "Leave me alone. I'm late for my nap."
Brooklyn = Old-timey stereotypes, stuck in the mud, and people who can't afford Manhattan.
The Bronx = errrrrrr....never a contender.
AOC and Mamdani are both local politicians, so I don't think it's remarkable that they arose locally. Trump has achieved national success by being something of an ideal example of his roots, but it's more than just coming from Queens, it's also a lifetime of navigating New York Real Estate and being a gifted showman.
wikiipedia says:
"Queens is one of the most linguistically and ethnically diverse places in the world"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens
personally, i think it's because the people from there are SO SAD that they're not from Nassau.
Imagine The Horror.. of being on the LONG Island..
and NOT being in Nassau.. YUK!
AOC was born in the Bronx (not Queens) but grew up in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County, north of the City and decidedly not in Queens.
Jay Gatsby was from Nassau county.. because he was cool
James Gatz was from North Dakota.. which is even worse than the Bronx
"AOC was born in the Bronx (not Queens) but grew up in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County, north of the City and decidedly not in Queens."
yeppers.
Bonus!
AOC - conceited Maybeline grrrl says what?
“I’m a Bronx girl,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on X. “You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast. Respectfully.”
She represents Queens. LOL.
Obama, Hilary, Pritzker, Brandon Johnson are all from Chicago.
Is there something about coming from Chicago that makes one predisposed to being corrupt and Neo-Stalinist leftist?
(Btw. The answer is "yes.")
You may want to check Grok’s responses against other sources. Grok says Mamdani attended “local schools” in Queens. Wikipedia says he went to Bank Street School (near Columbia, in Manhattan), Bronx High School of Science and Bowdoin College (in Maine).
If Queens is a melting pot of people from all over the world speaking 191 languages, then its not a place - its a polygot boarding house. The concrete and the streets don't give a place its character, the people do. And if everyone is from everywhere, your place is nowhere.
Trump, of course, was the son of millionare who went to an expensive boarding school and wharton. He's Manhattan not Queens. The "brash style" is his own.
That's a whole lot of discussion to describe people I don't really like.
Didn't George Bush I rename that Borough "The Queens"? Best Bushism evah!
Uganda... WTF?!!! Where's that fat, blow hard Homan when you need him?
>She insulted her male constituents.
*Mamdani "From Queens"????* I've read elsewhere that his father Mahmood Mamdani is a Columbia University professor, and that Mandani Jr grew up in faculty housing on Riverside Drive ... which is in Manhattan and about a million miles from Queens.
Gerri, Gerri, Gerri from Queens.
-Mark Russell, 1984
Semmi: But where in New York can one find a woman with grace, elegance, taste and culture? A woman suitable for a king.
Prince Akeem & Semmi: Queens!
AOC is a silver spoon rich girl who got a college degree and failed as a barista.
A model upbringing for an international socialist.
---- Feel free to read my chat with Grok
I'd love to, only I promised my dentist I'd see about a root canal today.....
From Queens? Meh! I was born in Jamaica Hospital, as was Donald J. Trump. It might have been a good hospital back then, but it ain't no more.
her father was a successful architect, that enabled her westchester education, but yet she is full of every foolish nostrum, that zinn and galeano could carve out,
I don't know tome is more tedious, I read them both,
AOC "claims" she's from The Bronx, but of course, like Obama, she refuses to release her birth certificate. All public records show her living in Yorkstown Heights. Which is not The Bronx, or Queens and is 40 miles from there.
@FLC, just like Obama or Tim Walz, we just have to take Sandy's word for it. What you claim to have done in your unit or where you claim you were born feels like...just like...like it was just so long ago!
It's indelible in the Claimocampus, she's a Boogie Down Clown.
his mother, was the famous indian film maker, mira nair, and his father a professor currently in Uganda, you know just regular folk
other celebrities who might be quintessentially Queens
Ru Paul...Dylan Mulvaney...Lindsay Graham
Time for a No Queens rally?
It's not surprising that NYC, Chicago, and SF (and at one point Boston) provide the Democrats with so many politicians. They're overwhelmingly Democrat cities in overwhelmingly Democrat states. The cities have a heavy media presence and the states have a lot of electoral votes. Queens is the most populous borough in NYC. Jerry Nadler has a big chunk of Manhattan and so long as he's around, Manhattan won't be charisma city.
Trump is a real son of Queens, born and raised there. Going away for a few years of military school and college and moving to Manhattan and then Palm Beach didn't change that. AOC and ZM are from elsewhere. Trump reminds me most of Christopher Walken who was born a few years and a few miles away from him. They share German-Scottish ancestry and they have different, but equally distinctive ways of speaking. Trump supporter James Caan reminds me of Walken and Trump, but he was from The Bronx.
Of course, deciding who "is" or who "looks like" a place depends on the era. Today's "multicultural" Queens is very different from post-war Baby Boomer Queens, and both are different from the more rural Queens of a century before.
Jimmy McMillan, the "rent is too damn high guy" lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn at various times. He's now in a senior center in Queens, but he's not what I would have thought of as typical Queens. Don't trust Grok, whatever he promises you.
AOC is a silver spoon rich girl who got a college degree and failed as a barista.
A model upbringing for an international socialist.
and Mamdani ?
his mother, was the famous indian film maker, mira nair, and his father a professor currently in Uganda, you know just regular folk
isn't it curious? how many staunch marxists are actually trustfund babies?
"isn't it curious? how many staunch marxists are actually trustfund babies?"
They recognize that they did nothing to earn their money so they imagine that nobody else did, either.
FormerLawClerk said...
AOC got elected because, despite her stand on the issues, she has the greatest set of tits in all of the Congress.
-------------------
I have only two words to sat to that,
Nancy Mace
say not sat
Queens has more assholes per square foot than anywhere in the United States. It's a cultural affinity that immigrants pick up and mimic.
Trump grew up in Queens before the US opened its doors to the third world. Not the same Queens Muslim Commie grew up in
They all belonged to the same club whose headquarters was located at 704 Hauser Street, Queens.
I like the demotic Donald Trump; beats the manipulative language the Democrats feed us, which is manipulative because they can never reveal [admit?] their true intentions outside of a small circle of insiders, whereas Trump is an open book, imperfect, but an open book.
Well, that was interesting. It turns out that both AOC and Mamdani moved to Queens about 8 years ago when they began their political careers in 2017. Althouse had to question Grok pretty sharply to get this fact out, but, yeah, neither AOC nor Mamdani was formed by the "Queens experience" - 190 ethnicities, all of them hard-working family people. Instead these two are using Queens as a political green cloth to cover the shameful facts of their own upbringing by the Beast, that is to say, in the cultural assumptions of well-off liberal Democrats in one of their enclaves in the Nineties. Then, both went to good colleges (Bowdoin, Boston College) and did well. The horror, the horror. And the two have never left their native thought domes but, being good at politics, both knew they couldn't sell Dem thought-dome ideas as such so they moved to a different community, Queens, and began to pose as people inluenced by that community. As if their socialism bubbled up from Queens whereas actually it was learned at Bowdoin or BC in an Economics or Sociology course.
In short, the two belong to the NGO dome-world which is where the princelings of liberalism go after they get their degree in the History or Literature or Sociology or Psychology of Settler-Colonialsm. Setter-Colonialism is what the NGO dome-world knows and sees as the next great ideology. It binds them together. (Mamdani even founded an SJP unit and the SJP is the premier settler-colonial organization.)
Now, datarepublican has shown that the NGOs form a political network which is in charge of the Democratic party. So if the NGOs are weighted toward the policies aligned with settler-colonialism then the Dem party will move that way even if the Queens voters do not. Thus, AOC and Mamdani. And Mamdani is enough of a politician to see that NYC is grindingly expensive and to offer immediate relief on rent and groceries which he did with talk of rent control and free grocery stores. So, overall, his Queens accent is fake but we can't be surprised to see him win in NYC. Less than 30% of the city turned out and he got less than half of those but it would be wrong to think he has no real strength. He has the NGO crowd and he has those having major trouble with rent and groceries. His policies won't work but that will be meaningless till someone else has a solution for those who can't escape from NYC.
I grew up in a town that is half in Queens and half in Nassau County, and I was in the Nassau part. Trump is Queens, AOC is not. AOC grew up in Yorktown Heights which is along the northern border of Westchester County, adjacent to Putnam County.
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