Letters

Folks: it is time to take Michael Daly at his word(s), unpleasant as that may be.

First: glide by his smarmy greeting card calls for “love.” His own words reveal him, above all, and consistently, a purveyor of hate and vilification, with an obsequious veneer covering an ugly egotism.

Check out his vocabulary in the service of promoting Liberty Gardens: the opposition is racist, bigoted, selfish, ignorant, crazy, wack-a-doodles, lunatics, angry, elitist haters, and the vicious underbelly of Southampton.

Question his self-promoting words about what he does for “our community.” In Daly-speak “our,” “we,” and “us” mean “him” and his clucking little cult, along with the developer he currently promotes.

He proclaims himself “founder” of the “organization” East End YIMBY. YIMBY (YES in MY Backyard) being the “positive” spin on NIMBY (NOT in MY Backyard). Both are catch all labels used by developers and their marketing/consultant/flacks to disparage and accuse any opposition to their plans.

For accuracy, founder Daly’s “organization” should be called YIYBY or Yes In “YOUR” Backyard for, as noted many times, his “backyard” abuts a nature preserve in North Haven, a small “single-family residential community with no affordable housing and no plans to construct any,” per the village clerk. He is the last person to speak about backyards.

In a mode of schizo-rhetoric, made acceptable by psycho-deplorables like Trump, he accuses others of what applies foremost to himself. To normalize? To divert? Complaining of the media “coverage” denied to him and the gentle folk “terrorized” at public meetings, is a supreme instance of this heinous tactic. For it is he who has heated up public meetings to the point of provoking danger with his aggression and ugly accusations and demeaning the process.

Ugly accusations, which can be traced by his specific, overheated verbiage, to most of the reportage of affordable housing in this paper, to an editorial in Newsday, articles in The Sag Harbor Express, The Beacon and recently in a column by Karl Grossman with predictable segues to Liberty Gardens. The “media” far from leaving him on the “cutting room floor” has given the public a bellyful of his trash-talk.

This hate-monger also sits on the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals, poised to render decisions supposedly objective, on issues he has coopted for his own ends. The community must understand and wrestle from him the words he deliberately misuses and corrupts.

The Town Board must understand he is inappropriate and relieve him of his official duties. His evocations of “terror” and “children being targeted” and divisive use of “racism” and “bigotry” are dangerous no matter how he attaches them to empty words of love, respect and free speech. Shut him down, and shut him up.

Frances Genovese

Southampton