Awful rich guys tend to be awful and rich for something like the same reasons, but not necessarily in the same ways. Not all of them are up to the task of being a public figure. Put Donald Trump on a couch with TV cameras pointed at him and you'll end up with a guy saying a lot of ludicrous and offensive stuff, but he'll at least be in a total state of comfort while saying it. Put James Dolan in the same position and you end up with whatever the hell happened on Good Day New York this morning.
Dolan appeared on the program to respond to a recent spate of bad press that he's received for his decision to use facial recognition technology to ban employees of law firms with which he's engaged in litigation from Madison Square Garden. That's a petty and frankly weird thing to do, but Dolan is nothing if not a petty and weird guy. For example, here's how he responded to the host's suggestion that using facial recognition technology to chuck paying customers from MSG based solely on who they work for might be something that could be viewed as a civil rights violation: "Do you think that those attorneys are a minority?" You're on TV, man! People can hear you!
Dolan saved the real heat for when the conversation turned to the New York State Liquor Authority, which has made some threats about pulling MSG's liquor license in response to Dolan trying to run his arena's security team like a counter-terrorism unit. Dolan said he has a plan for dealing with that, and he revealed it with the assistance of a prop:
"What we're gonna do is we're gonna pick a night, maybe a Rangers game, and we're gonna shut down all the liquor and alcohol in the building." Dolan said. "Now this isn't gonna bother me because I've been sober 29 years, I don't need the liquor. Instead, what we're gonna do, is, where we serve liquor, we're gonna put one of these up, which says, 'If you would like to drink at a game, please call Sharif Kabir, Chief Executive Offer, or write him an email at this number, and tell him to stick to his knitting and what he's supposed to be doing, and stop grandstanding to try and get press.'"
It's in these moments that it becomes painfully clear that Dolan just doesn't have the juice. This stunt probably played out as a Totally Epic Win when he concocted it his head the night before, and if he ran it by anyone they doubtless told him what he wanted to hear in response. But when it comes time to actually execute a bit Dolan always melts. He's just a weird old man wearing a scarf on a TV set and fumbling with a piece of computer paper while trying to jam complete sentences into an otherwise unending stream of "um," "right," and "so."
When Dolan wasn't face-planting while explaining his current beefs, he was moaning about bail reform and landlord rights in the exact same pitch and tone as every other old white guy who spends too much time reading The Daily Wire; the idea of Replacement Level has never been easier to understand. These moments were just another example of how shallow Dolan's personality is—he's a fabulously wealthy person with the entire world at his fingertips, and yet he spends his day reading the same braindead Twitter threads as your uncle. Any yutz in any diner on Long Island could give you the same stuff, at the same quality.
They let this guy be on TV for 17 minutes! A wet sponge would have been more compelling.
