We take our pizza personally in New York, so it was preordained that when city bureaucrats started messing with it, someone would stand up and do something about it.
That something was to fight back.
The city’s Department of Environmental Regulation is pushing a new rule that targets pizza parlors as a villain of the climate change "crisis."
Pizza shops with wood-fired or coal-fired ovens would have to undergo annual inspections and conduct an assessment that may force them to install filtering equipment that could cost $20,000 or more — plus maintenance.
This is where it gets personal.
This writer' s number one pizza place is Table 87.
It's just down the street from me in Brooklyn (the owners landed $250,000 on ABC's "Shark Tank").
It uses a coal-fired oven for a roasted, smoky flavor.
This writer's new number two spot, Smith Street Pizza, has a wood-burning oven that chars the crust perfectly. In nearby Ceconi’s Dumbo, they deploy an open wood-burning oven at the entrance, where you can watch the pies sizzle and bubble next to dancing flames.
And I just have to say, leave ’em alone.
It's enough to put a pizza shop out of business, so, a conservative activist and artist staged a protest at City Hall and gave officials a "pizza" his mind.
On Monday, June 24, Scott LoBaido showed up with five boxes of freshly baked pizza pies and made a moving speech, akin to the "I’m mad as hell" rant of the deranged anchorman Howard Beal in the movie "Network."
"The woke-ass idiots who run this city are doing everything in their power to destroy it," LoBaido begins, complaining about "naked men with their titties bouncing around," as the crime rate soars, small businesses are "destroyed," and illegal immigrants are treated better than homeless veterans.
"And the woke-ass punks who run New York City are afraid of PIZZA!!!???" he thunders— and then he starts hurling slices over a wrought-iron fence, onto city property.
A city cop approaches, but LoBaido proceeds, unabashedly.
Afterward, he got a summons.
His video tweet got almost two million views on Twitter, and LoBaido made an appearance on Newsmax’s "Rob Schmitt Tonight" (here) and Fox News; even the BBC covered his protest.
I celebrate LoBaido’s rant in my three-minute video on Twitter, here.
Emboldened, LoBaido posted a second, profanity-rich rant on Wednesday and got 1.3 million more views by Friday.
He holds up a news photo of two naked men at a Pride parade in New York, their flaccid Full Montys fully exposed while very young children walk past them.
"I want everybody, even you on the Left, even you gay folks, you folks of the alphabet community, all of you, conservatives, liberals, I want everybody to look at this photograph. It’s historical. It is so powerful. Look at it! Don’t look away!"
“How the f***am I the only one pissed off at this?
Many people are, but what are you doing? "Nothing!," LoBaido says.
And a star is born. Richard LoBaido nails it: New York City, as in so many other cities in the U.S., fails to enforce some of the most basic laws, such as a ban on exposing your man-junk to children, even as it invents new laws that have no real purpose other than politics and virtue-signaling.
And amassing government power.
The city aims to reduce pizza ovens’ carbon emissions by 75%, but this is purely for appearances. Fewer than 100 shops would be covered — in a city where more than 1.8 million people drive their gas-burning cars to work every day, and the skies turn yellow from the smoke from forest fires in Canada.
Pizza makers play no role in climate change, but they will pay dearly in a sop to government optics. This is a twofer: lunacy and stupidity, combined.
The lesson here is that government, at every level, will encroach on our lives and our freedoms as far as it can, until we stand up and push back. Scott LoBaio planned a third broadside over the weekend, and I am eager to hear every f-bomb he drops.
Dennis Kneale is a writer and media strategist in New York and host of the podcast, "What's Bugging Me." Previously, he was an anchor at CNBC and at Fox Business Network, after serving as a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal and managing editor of Forbes. Read Dennis Kneale's reports — More Here.
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