As the 2025 New York City mayoral race heats up, the Republican Party in New York has once again demonstrated a stunning lack of seriousness and strategic foresight by rallying around Curtis Sliwa, a man whose long record of deception, media theatrics, and governing unseriousness should disqualify him from holding any public office—let alone leading the nation’s largest and most complex city.

That Curtis Sliwa is an accomplished self-promoter is beyond dispute. The founder of the Guardian Angels, a self-styled volunteer subway patrol group, he has spent more than four decades cultivating an image as a streetwise crusader against crime. But peel back the flashy red beret and the breathless media coverage, and what you find is not a civic leader, but a man who manufactured his public persona through outright lies—and has never been held meaningfully accountable for it.

According to reporting by the Associated Press in November 1992, Sliwa admitted to faking his own kidnapping in 1980 and fabricating at least five other major incidents in the early days of the Guardian Angels. These included concocted tales of heroic subway rescues, assaults by rapists, hate crimes outside Guardian Angels’ headquarters, and even the dramatic claim that rogue transit police officers abducted him in an effort to shut down his subway patrols.

None of it happened.

“I was wrong,” Sliwa told the Associated Press at the time. “We were just little people trying to get recognition.” He likened himself to Don Quixote—a tragicomic figure mistaking windmills for monsters—as if mythmaking were a noble substitute for truth. But his real motivations were more cynical. “It became like an intoxicant, a narcotic,” he confessed, openly acknowledging that the lure of press attention pushed him to build his platform on falsehoods. These were not harmless exaggerations. These were deliberate deceptions, designed to manipulate public perception, and to propel Sliwa’s personal brand into the spotlight.

That brand has been extraordinarily lucrative for him. The Guardian Angels, though largely ineffective in fighting crime, gave Sliwa exactly what he wanted: notoriety. From there, he parlayed his fame into a successful career in talk radio, where he continues to perform the role of urban provocateur. But when it comes to actual results—governing experience, policy innovation, coalition-building, public finance—Sliwa has delivered none of it.

He ran for mayor before, and he lost—badly. His campaign offered little more than recycled slogans, pet-cat anecdotes, and a throwback image of New York that doesn’t reflect the complicated challenges of today. Sliwa keeps 18 cats in his cramped Upper West Side apartment, and he’s had more failed marriages than successful public policies. He thrives on chaos, not consensus-building. He is more interested in being seen than being effective. He is a spectacle, not a statesman.

And yet, here we are again—watching the New York Republican Party elevate this political performance artist as their supposed answer to decades of Democratic dominance. It is, frankly, disgraceful.

Where is the leadership? Where is the bench of candidates with real records in city management, law enforcement reform, economic development, or housing policy? The Republican establishment in New York has spent years complaining—often rightly—about the city’s broken bureaucracy, its spiraling cost of living, its deteriorating public safety, and its ideological extremes. And yet, when given the chance to present a serious alternative, they fall back on a man whose career was built on lies and whose only consistent achievement has been keeping himself in the headlines.

This is not just a political mistake—it is a moral abdication. If the GOP in New York wants to be more than a paper tiger in city politics, it must do better than Curtis Sliwa. It must find a candidate with real executive experience, real policy knowledge, and real credibility with the voters who are desperate for change. That candidate is not Curtis Sliwa. It never was. And the fact that the party cannot—or will not—see that is the clearest proof that it has no serious interest in actually winning this race or governing this city.

Let’s be clear: New York City is not a game board for failed vigilantes. It is a city of over 8 million people, with layered, urgent problems that demand complex, competent solutions. Curtis Sliwa’s record of fabrications, his media addiction, his lack of governing skill, and his cartoonish understanding of leadership make him dangerously unfit for the mayor’s office.

And if the New York GOP chooses to stick by him? Then they’re not just ignoring the truth—they’re complicit in the lie.

Curtis Sliwa should not be the next mayor of New York City. And the New York Republican Party should be ashamed that he is even in the running.