One New Year's resolution that journalists need to start adopting right this minute: Stop saying Rudy Giuliani has changed. The latest iteration of this annoying truism comes to us courtesy of David French of the New York Times, who argues "Rudy Giuliani isn’t truly Rudy Giuliani any longer," but has experienced a "long descent from a post-9/11 American hero to a mocked, derided and embattled criminal defendant ." French is a never-Trump Republican, but even liberals who should know better have embraced this "fall from grace" narrative. John Oliver on "Last Week Tonight" exclaimed Sunday that the modern iteration of Giuliani is "desperately trying to coast off of the guy that Giuliani was 20 years ago."
There's been some pushback against this line, most notably from Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times. Back in August, Bouie reminded readers that, decades before Giuliani was sued for defaming two Georgia election workers as part of a larger attempt to steal the 2020 election, he was a "scowling demagogue who stoked the flames of chauvinism and racial hatred." The story that Bouie tells, of Giuliani participating in a racist police riot in 1989, is revolting. But wildly, it's also just the tip of the iceberg that is Giuliani's long and ugly history of being the absolute worst.
Two other stories from Giuliani's time as New York City's mayor have been largely forgotten, but should be revived in light of the MAGA movement going hard on book bannings and other attacks on artists, especially those who are queer or people of color. Before 9/11, Giuliani's biggest national news story was his war on the Brooklyn Museum, who he threatened to shut down because they exhibited art he didn't like. In a move so authoritarian that even Moms for Liberty might balk at it, he also functionally banned dancing in much of New York City.
In late 1999, the Brooklyn Museum scheduled an art exhibit titled "SENSATION: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," which had first been displayed at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Many of the pieces in the exhibit have become famous, in no small part due to Giuliani's over-the-top histrionics in denouncing the exhibit and threatening to literally shut down the entire museum if they would not comply with his demands to cancel the show. Giuliani claimed to be especially outraged by Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary," which Ofili described as "a hip-hop version" of the classic artistic subject.
Calling the painting "sick stuff," Giuliani whined, "you can't do things that desecrate the most personal and deeply held views of people in society." He then spent months threatening the museum's funding, using bureaucratic harassment, and of course screaming into every microphone he could find in his censorship campaign. The excuse for all these tantrums was the Ofili used elephant dung as part of his painting material, which Ofili explained is a "way of raising the paintings up from the ground and giving them a feeling that they've come from the earth rather than simply being hung on a wall." Many commentators at the time noted that Giuliani's rage probably had more to do with the fact that the Virgin in this painting is Black.
The museum sued Giuliani on First Amendment grounds, and eventually won with an out-of-court settlement forcing Giuliani to restore all the funding he'd withheld. But Giuliani had already gotten what he wanted out of the debacle: An opportunity to perform the worst kind of authoritarian politics. Everything about this was MAGA before MAGA. It was anti-free speech, unsubtly racist, anti-intellectual and hysterically sex-negative. It was also a precursor to the Christian nationalism of the current GOP, in that Giuliani treated it as the government's job to shield Christianity from criticism, a stance that is wholly incompatible with the First Amendment.
The dancing ban under Giuliani is a good reminder that he hasn't just always been a fascist at heart, but that he's also always been a straight up weirdo. "As mayor of NYC from 1994 through 2001, Rudy Giuliani demonized nightlife as our city's bastard child, trying to smooth it over in order to make things safe for tourists and co-op owners," Michael Musto wrote in 2017 in a history of Giuliani's war on dancing for Vice.
The main tool? The "cabaret" law that literally been passed in 1926, "a bit of archaic legislation that decreed there couldn't be more than three people dancing" in a bar or nightclub at a time, at least without the vanishingly rare and hard-to-obtain cabaret licenses. The law claimed to be targeting "vice," but of course its main purpose was to give police an excuse to selectively target people of color or LGBTQ people. Of course Giuliani was going to bring this outdated law back, and for the exact same racist and homophobic purposes that the law was originally used for. But he was so aggressive about it that dancing became pretty much forbidden in nearly every place that served alcohol. I recall one time shaking my butt a little to a jukebox at a wood-paneled pool bar in New York and the bartender yelling at me, fearful that the place would be fined for even that.
This was a full decade after the movie "Footloose" came out. Even the Southern Baptists were more evolved, as Baylor University had repealed their dancing ban in 1996. But Giuliani so prioritized enforcement that it took years after he left office for the police to dial back enforcement. The law was finally repealed in 2017, under pressure from immigrant and minority communities who were sick of living in fear.
Many people in the 90s were full well aware that Giuliani was a bizarre authoritarian. Most New Yorkers opposed his attacks on the Brooklyn Museum, and it was largely viewed at the time as his attempt to get attention for his national ambitions. Writing for Salon in 1999, Cintra Wilson described Giuliani as having a "hubris-rotted cop-brain." The band !!! wrote a song about the dancing ban calling Giuliani "the piggiest pig."
Looking back, it's not just the seeds of MAGA we see in Giuliani's assault on the cultural vibrancy of New York City. The end of his tenure as mayor also had an alarming portend. Using 9/11 as an excuse, Giuliani reportedly reached out to then-Gov. George Pataki and asked for the 2001 mayoral election to be canceled, so that Giuliani could stay in power indefinitely. Giuliani denies the claim, but as he lies about everything, his denials are meaningless. It's no wonder that Giuliani became a leader in Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and through a similar strategy of demanding that someone — the Vice President, the courts, Congress — swoop in and simply nullify the entire vote. Giuliani told everyone who he was decades ago. If only more people had believed him.
