Christian Divyne, a 31-year-old comedian, was midway through streaming the New York City mayoral debate on Oct. 22 when he predicted what would go viral.
It wasn’t the candidates’ stances on President Donald Trump or their approach to affordable housing. It wasn’t a heated discussion on the new ballot proposals. It was a single line Curtis Sliwa said: “Don’t be glazing me here, Zohran.”
Divyne was right: Sliwa’s quippy one-liner—using Gen Z slang for “buttering up”—quickly blew up on TikTok. But later that night, after scrolling through dozens of Sliwa video edits or skits, he’d had enough, so he decided to make a post himself.
“Not to suck all the air out of the room but we need to stop the babygirlification of Curtis Sliwa,” he said in a video posted to his TikTok account, using a term that zoomers and millennials use to affectionately describe a male celebrity or fictional character when they show their sensitive side.
“Is he a silly man who’s been wearing a red beret for 40 years and his vigilante group looks like the gang from Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It’? Yes. Does he also believe that we need to be trying more minors as adults and sending them off to Rikers? Yeah. That’s his stance,” Divyne said in the video.
Divyne’s video has been viewed, to date, over 800,000 times, and ignited an online debate about romanticizing—or even infintalizing—male politicians.
The 71-year-old Republican has been a fixture of New York politics since the 1980s, when he founded the nonprofit Guardian Angels, which combats subway crime. He’s faced controversies along the way. Most recently, in 2024, Silwa and the Guardian Angels were criticized after they wrongfully attacked a man in Times Square. At the time, Sliwa said that he thought the man was a migrant because he was “speaking Spanish.”
He also ran for mayor in 2021, but he did not experience the same virality then.
Sliwa, who has been described online as a loveable “uncle” and “crazy neighbor,” is undoubtedly meme-able. (He once had 16 cats in a 320-square-foot apartment and quotes Braveheart. He said that mayors should go to every parade.) One person commented under Divyne’s video and described Sliwa as an “an evil eccentric cartoon character.” Others said he should be New York’s “court jester,” “mascot,” or “cultural ambassador.”
Divyne is wary of Sliwa’s internet popularity. “I don’t think people know about his politics at all,” Divyne said Tuesday.
“The issue is that people are going to get the clip of Curtis Sliwa saying that he doesn’t want Zohran glazing him,” he said. “They’re not going to get the clip from 10 minutes earlier in the debate where he said Zohran wanted a global Jihad.”
Sliwa’s campaign team isn’t surprised that he’s evolved into an internet star.
“Gen Z and Millennials aren’t gravitating toward Curtis by accident; they see someone authentic, unscripted, and living the life he talks about, which is rare in politics today,” Daniel Kurzyna, a spokesperson for Sliwa, said in a statement. “The humor may draw attention, but what keeps them engaged is that he speaks plainly about safety, affordability, and accountability in a way that feels honest, relatable, and not manufactured.”
Sliwa, who is currently polling last in the race, is still somehow recognized by Gen Zers from across the country—or even, according to content creator Tony Mangucci, across the world.
Mangucci, a California-based TikToker who is in his mid-twenties, said that even his international friends know Sliwa. They don’t, however, know much about what he stands for.
“It’s easy to like him because he dislikes Cuomo,” Mangucci said. “I would imagine that 90 percent of people in these comments saying [they like him] have no clue what his policies are.”
Mangucci, who posted his own widely-viewed TikTok skit about Sliwa, said that people aren’t really seeing the candidate as a real threat.
“They’re not even looking at him as a potential candidate,” he said. “They’re not looking into the s— that he stands for. They’re just hearing the words that he says and going, ‘that’s my parade guy.’”
“When you don’t know what somebody stands for, it’s so easy to look at somebody on TikTok the same way you see anybody else on TikTok,” he said. “You look at him like an influencer.”
The hotly contested mayoral race, which thrust Zohran Mamdani into the spotlight, largely rode on the backs of a sophisticated social media campaign that resonated with his internet savvy, Gen Z supporters. After starting in the polls at just 1 percent, the 33-year-old democratic socialist hurtled to the winning spot in the primary. The New York Board of Elections reported that a record number—40 percent—of voters were under 40 years old. Recent polls show Mamdani with a significant lead as Election Day approaches.
Sliwa is, of course, not the only candidate that’s become babygirl-ified–Mamdami has gotten his fair share of this kind of attention, too. Edited photos of him with anime-inspired cat ears have been shared widely, and some people call him a “cutie patootie” online.
“I know we’re not supposed to romanticize politicians but…” one comment said on an edit of Mamdani on TikTok, which got nearly 150K likes.
While Sliwa’s popularity online has been organic, many politicians have tried to implement their own Gen Z social media strategy—for example, Gavin Newsom’s Twitter trolling. Some candidates are even trying to parrot one of the arguably most successful online campaigners: Donald Trump.
Along with the president’s early days of online ranting, his 2024 victory was partly attributed to investing in relationships with social media influencers. Today, as Sliwa appears on popular TikTok shows, some social media users have begun to make the comparison.
“They thought [Trump] was a joke, and he was getting clipped and memed all the time,” Divyne said Tuesday.
“The ‘he’s funny’ rhetoric is how we ended up with Trump,” another TikTok comment agreed.
Khalil Gamble, 27, said that Sliwa reminded him of 2016 Trump, calling it “diva” behavior to refuse to play by the invisible rules of debate.
Gamble’s own video about the debate, uses the typical format of the Mamdani-Cuomo-Sliwa meme that’s circulating the internet. It goes like this: Mamdani answers a question while staying cool and collected. Andrew Cuomo refuses to answer. And Sliwa says something related to his strange lore. It typically has something to do with his vigilante days—or how he was shot in the back of a taxi.
In Gamble’s video, for example, he pretends to ask the candidates: “Who won the Kendrick Lamar-Drake beef?”
“Kendrick, obviously,” he says as Mamdani.
“I don’t listen to rap music,” he says as Cuomo.
Then, in a gruff voice, he impersonates Sliwa: “On Sep. 7, 1996, I killed Tupac Shukar.”
The video has been viewed more than 2.5 million times.
People like to adopt public figures as “pets,” Gamble said. “Especially if they’re strange, like Sliwa is.”
Natalia Petrzela, a historian of contemporary American history and professor at The New School, said the phenomenon behind Sliwa’s newfound virality was bigger than him. Most voters today—of any age—are getting their politics through “decontextualized quick clips.”
“It speaks to our hunger for quick entertainment, as opposed to sustained policy information or analysis,” she said. While comparing Sliwa to Trump, she said that voters assume that he’s a “clownish, funny, humorous figure rather than a real political contender.”
Sliwa’s spokesperson, Kurzyna, disputed the comparison: “Curtis Sliwa is not a carbon copy of anyone; he is running to fix New York, and people are responding to his authenticity, not a manufactured persona.”
Kevin Munger, a professor of social media and political communication at the European University Institute in Florence, published a paper in the scientific journal Social Media & Society about political TikTok thirst traps.
“Beyond the necessary step of attracting viewer attention, the goal of these edits is to present a specific point of view: that the politician is attractive, or intimidating, or funny,” he wrote in a Substack post about the paper. “The importance of candidate attractiveness for voter evaluation grows as the capacity to communicate their attractiveness audiovisual becomes democratized and contested.”
These videos have nothing to do with policies, Munger said in an interview. “Short form video is a primary way that people encounter information about politics,” he said. “The babygirlification of this very old conservative man fits into the aesthetic conversation that’s happening on TikTok.”
“And yes, I think it’s bad for democracy,” said Munger. “I think it’s bad for deliberation and critical thinking and reason and all of these fundamental values underlying democracy. But that’s the world that the technology we have has created.”
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