Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Culture shock: Longtime Rye Brook resident and civic leader moves to Upstate MAGA country
June 5, 2024 at 10:36 p.m.
Jeff Diamond and his wife Kozue lived in Rye Brook’s Blind Brook School District for 30 years and raised three children grades K-12, with Diamond serving on the Blind Brook school board for nine years, including time as president.
So it was a surprise to me when he decided to sell his home here and head to rural New York for a home in a condo association on Lake Canandaigua in the Finger Lakes District.
Politically, he went from living in the near Democratic solid 16th Congressional District, and a heavily Democratic community, to one of the most conservative Republican right-wing areas in the state or the nation, the 24th District, now represented by Republican Claudia Tenney.
In a country where citizens are being asked to step out of their “bubble” and meet and greet the “other Americans,” I decided to contact Diamond and ask how it felt being immersed in what for many in Rye Brook is an “alien” culture.
Diamond on his neighbors
and their Congresswoman
“I think a lot of people are nice people that if you meet them and you don’t discuss politics, you would never dream that they would vote for a Donald Trump or that they would necessarily buy into all of this MAGA ‘the election was stolen’ and all of this America First and Project 2025 stuff,” said Diamond. “I think most people have no idea of that. So I would kind of group the majority of Republicans I’ve met who have declared themselves to me that ‘I’m a Republican and will vote for Trump’—I think the large majority of them are culturally Republican/Conservatives who vote for Republicans.
“I’ll give you a perfect example. My congressional representative is Claudia Tenney, who is an extremist MAGA Republican whom I call the Marjorie Taylor Greene of Western New York.
In her run up to her (Tenney’s) mid-term election in 2022, just prior to that, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked by a crazy man with a hammer who put him in intensive care, and Claudia Tenney tweeted ‘LOL (Laugh Out Loud),’ with a meme making fun of Paul Pelosi for getting beaten over the head with a hammer. And she was included in the national news with a lot of other GOP’ers who tweeted unseemly responses to the incident or made weird implications to write it off like it never really happened, or Paul Pelosi was in a gay love affair.
“Anyway, we’ve got Claudia Tenney here who’s tweeting LOL at something like this, just disgusting, and I have next door neighbors, they are very kind, very nice people, the wife is a Democrat and the husband is a Republican, the husband watches a lot of Fox News and never heard of this incident. So I brought it to his attention and showed it to him and he was so deeply offended, even though he is a Republican who would have automatically pulled the lever for Claudia Tenney, said ‘I would never vote for anybody who would do something like that.’
“So here’s a perfect example of a decent person who is a lifelong Republican, who is completely unaware of what’s (appearing) on Twitter (now “X”), he doesn’t have a Twitter account, he watches Fox News, and none of that reports the type of disgusting behavior that some of these extreme MAGA Republicans display, but when you point it out to them, they’re offended as any other decent person would be.”
On the COVID epidemic
as an eye opener
“We moved here during COVID. My wife and I would go into a store or supermarket or whatever and it was a 50-50 split between people wearing masks and not wearing masks. (A big change) from having moved up here from Blind Brook, where it was more of a 90 to single digit split between masks versus no masks.
“When we moved up here, there were a lot of people who were refusing to put on masks, or didn’t feel it was necessary, or thought it was a hoax, or thought COVID wasn’t something they had to be afraid of, or they could get the horse antibiotic—that that would save them if they got COVID. Some of those people would stare at you because you were wearing a mask. So that was a little uncomfortable. We kind of kept an eye on places—where they were wearing masks, where they were not wearing masks, and during COVID maybe you would want to only go to the places where they were wearing masks.
Residents in Jeff Diamond’s Congressional district with signs on their property including “Hillary for Prison,” “Biden Sucks” and “Trump 2024.”Courtesy of Jeff Diamond
“I remember talking to neighbors who wouldn’t have family or friends over (to their home) who refused to wear masks or refused to be vaccinated. There was a significant number of people who refused to be vaccinated up here. So that was a concern.
“And then sometimes you’d go into a drugstore to get a vaccination and you’d be standing on the line that had a sign saying ‘COVID check-in here’ and people would look at you sideways because they didn’t believe in the vaccine or thought COVID was a hoax. The politization of COVID and vaccines—you definitely felt it up here.”
On identifying MAGA extremists
“It’s kind of interesting that we’ll meet somebody through friends or neighbors, and you’ll get to know them on a superficial level, and you’ll have a perfectly pleasant conversation, and you don’t pick up any vibes. And then afterwards you find out, this person is an anti-vaxxer, or a deep believer in Trump or MAGA, or they spread around e-mails that preach the MAGA gospel, and it’s kind of shocking sometimes.
“Because when you meet someone in a nonpolitical situation, and you have only conversations that don’t lead to politics, you don’t pick up any kind of vibe that someone is really into it at all. I guess that boils down to saying that we have a country that’s deeply divided over political issues, but when you step outside of those political issues, sometimes you can’t even guess.
“But I notice that a lot of people … avoid any mention of politics. And that’s because up here there’s a sort of a clear dichotomy and people prefer not to want to confront it, regardless of which side you are on.
“The ones who do confront it tend to be the deep believers in MAGA. They wear it on their sleeves. They emblazon it on their barns. They run it up their flagpoles. They place ‘Put Hillary in Prison’ signs on their front lawns.”
Why you should choose Upstate New York
instead of expensive downstate suburbs
“My daughter Mari (and her husband) just bought a house in Rochester, about 40 minutes from where we live. My daughter had to make offers on eight homes before she got an acceptance. Some sellers get 10 or 15 offers within a few days of their home going on the market. Even if you pay full price, it’s a fraction of what you’d have to pay in Westchester.”
I should note that Rochester is in New York’s 25th District, and while it adjoins the 24th, it is represented by a Democrat, Congressman Joe Morelle.
Mari Diamond and her husband are leaving Norwalk, Ct., where they could not afford to buy a home as they could in Rochester. Fortunately, Mari and her husband have “remote” jobs which require no commuting.
In another century, Horace Greeley advised young Americans to “Go West.”
Today, the advice may be: move to a small city or rural Congressional district where the culture and politics fit you.
If the Diamonds’ experience is typical, the political divide in America will continue to grow.
A postscript
Jeff Diamond was interviewed, and this column was written, before a Manhattan jury last Thursday unanimously convicted former President Trump on 34 felony counts. I’ve since asked Diamond how his area neighbors have reacted to the conviction by sharing photos of any signs he has seen pop up. So far, Jeff has sent no photos, which probably means those neighbors have yet to get new signs printed or distributed. For sure, they’re coming.
Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.
Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.
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