( ♤ Author’s note: A year after writing this, Justin Brannan is 7 months into his first term and has turned out being as centrist and as beholden to big monied interests as the rest of the NYC Council. It was a fear I had when I first wrote this piece on him and the council race he was involved in last year. Sadly, none of the other candidates from that council election would have been any better. But likely they wouldn’t have been much worse either.
BUYER’S REMORSE: Justin Brannan has turned out being a run-of-the-mill council lackey posing as a progressive. • August 4th, 2018 AD. ♤ )
• July 4, 2017: In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in NYC, there is a very high profile city council race going on this year for the open seat and one of the major players in the race is Justin Brannan, a favorite son of Bay Ridge and a legitimately talented and intelligent politician who has been leading a Democratic club that he started in Bay Ridge about 7 years ago when the other local Democratic club in Bay Ridge, started and run by a centrist Democrat named Kevin Peter Carroll, turned out to be dramatically ineffective and ingloriously imploded. Brannan, disgusted by the design and the efforts of Carroll’s club and with Carroll’s using the club as a personal vehicle, continued forward with his newly formed club, the Bay Ridge Democrats, and steadily proved himself more adept at navigating the strange and tricky political waters of Bay Ridge than the other local Dem & GOP operatives and clubs and the next generation of local leadership. Justin Brannan’s brand is very simple: sincerity.