Were it not for the virtual certainty that he will be cast in a Safdie-directed film at some point, Sid Rosenberg is not a person who should be known by anyone who does not live in or around New York City. He is a type of public figure that every city has, although the fact that he's this particular city's version makes him maybe a bit ruddier and cruder than the average. Most of those guys will never get to meet or be photographed with Donald Trump, and so will have to settle for spending their lives acting as much like him as their specific material circumstances allow.
That's been kind of a chancy proposition for Rosenberg, who currently hosts a radio show on a conservative talk radio station operated by the owner of the city's most widely reviled grocery store chain. (That owner, John Catsimatidis, has already been in a Josh Safdie movie.) Rosenberg has been a public figure in the city for a long time, growing larger and more distressingly toasted-looking along the way; the moment that Sid Rosenberg became capable of "taking it easy," he would be out of a job. There might be something half-tragic about this purgatory if Rosenberg didn't seem so comfortable there, and even if he had to wind himself up like a wrung-out pro wrestler before going on the radio every day to call Muslims parasites and talk about how no one respects the cops anymore, he'd still be doing all that. The idea that there is anything that itches at him about the sour sort of fame that Rosenberg has built for himself, as the voice of the city's aggrieved homeowner set and other local excessive force aficionados, is assuming facts not otherwise in evidence.
As it stands, Rosenberg has spent a lot of time cycling in and out of local media jobs, first due to addiction issues and then just due to his personality. He was fired from Don Imus's morning show on WFAN for "tasteless comments he made on the air about the singer Kylie Minogue's battle with breast cancer" in 2005, and then from his job at the station later that year when he no-showed a Giants pregame show he was supposed to host after attending an FHM magazine event in Atlantic City earlier in the weekend. This came after he was fired from Imus in 2001 for being extremely racist about Serena and Venus Williams, then rehired after apologizing, and then in 2004 "referred to Palestinians as 'stinking animals' and said, 'They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill 'em all right now.'" By 2007, he was appearing on Imus again.
Rosenberg has more or less gone on like this since, periodically issuing apologies for things like saying Mayor Zohran Mamdani would be "cheering" if "another 9/11" attack happened in the city or calling Mamdani a "Radical Islam cockroach." It is simple arithmetic that there are more people who believe and act like Sid Rosenberg living in New York City than there are in several states represented in D.C. by two Republican Senators, but while people like him have a great deal of sway in some aspects of city life—former NYPD Chief of Department John Chell has claimed that he instituted a "standing order" of "free pass for Sid's friends"—they're also marginal enough that they have to pretty much act like Sid Rosenberg to be noticeable. They live in a sort of parallel city in which they are forever both helpless terrified victims and swaggering snowflake-triggering bossmen; the news in that city is nothing but the sound of a thousand voices shouting over each other about how the city is gone, dead, disgusting.
For someone who lives in the actual city that exists, encountering this sort of discourse in the wild is like when you step onto a suspiciously empty subway car on an otherwise crowded train and instantly understand why no one is sitting in it. It is sufficient to know that it smells crazy in there, but the specific pungency can still be startling. This is how I felt when I was tipped off, by multiple people who presumably knew that I would not enjoy such a tip, about Rosenberg calling Mr. Met "a raging antisemite" on Twitter. Like a lot of Rosenberg-type stuff, it scans more or less like a joke. As evidence for his assertion that Mr. Met is an antisemite, Rosenberg included a picture of himself making the What Are They Givin' Me gesture after "being IGNORED" by Mr. Met at a game last season:
Rosenberg also posted a video asserting that "after almost 59 years of being a die-hard New York Met fan," he is done with the team because "the Mayor Mamdani, that creep, is a Met fan" and because Mr. Met "hugged Mamdani like he was President Trump, he hugged him and he kissed him."
Do you get it? Rosenberg is making a joke that only sort of seems to understand itself as a joke, and which is harder to parse coming as it does from someone whose entire loud public life is lived in the airless middle space between pretend umbrage and the real thing. That it seems aimed less at any kind of laugh than at the upside-down anti-laugh expressed by the ROFL emoji is not a surprise—that response has long ago supplanted actual laughter for this cohort—but still fairly grim. It is a guy whose job it is to say "I'm done" every day saying "I'm done" to an audience whose brains are so poached in this sort of thing that they can only barely manage to say "I'm done" back, and it's about something that none of them are remotely able to quit. If there's anything that's all the way funny about this, it's that—however much time they might spend in Florida, these people will not and could not ever live anywhere else.
