Pirate Attempts To Pirate The Village

March 19, 2025 4:02 PM

Hold My Snacks: Pirate’s Booty Founder Attempts a Seaside Coup: A snack food magnate declared himself mayor of the Village of Sea Cliff, on Long Island. The voters said otherwise. "But elections these days don’t always end when they’re over. And so even before the final vote had been counted, that snack food mogul — who professionally uses the title Captain Bootyhead — declared that the election was “rigged” and that he was the mayor of Sea Cliff."

"It all started last Monday, when Robert Ehrlich, the founder of Pirate’s Booty Snacks, marched into the Village Hall in Sea Cliff (pop. 5,000) and announced that he was now the mayor. Everyone else, he said, was fired.
Mr. Ehrlich, 66, was invoking a 2009 state law that empowers residents to dissolve their town or reformulate it. The first step is to gather signatures from 10 percent of the town’s voters. Mr. Ehrlich waved an envelope that he claimed held 1,800 signatures. He declined to show them to anyone because he said the signers were afraid of retribution."

This gets all the funnier when the current mayor points out that if you dissolve the village, then you have no village to be mayor of.

"You can’t come out on the eve of the election and just throw everything up in the air.” She paused. “Well, I guess in the current world order you can.”

posted by jenfullmoon (33 comments total)

Gee, I wonder where he got this idea....
posted by briank at 4:09 PM on March 19 [8 favorites]

a magat pirate!
posted by nofundy at 4:09 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

So the election was less stolen, and more pirated...did I get that right?
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 4:15 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

This guy will be Secretary of Fatherland Security in a month, mark my words.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 4:18 PM on March 19 [15 favorites]

I think Ehrlich at one point claimed he would dissolve the existing village and set up another one with himself as mayor. The newly re-elected mayor claims Ehrlich and his associates burst into village hall, told everyone they were fired and "used profane language." It seems like he has a history of colorful litigation.

Villages are weird in New York State law because they are inside towns which have their own municipal governments, and towns are inside of counties that also have their own governments. I've never fully understood them, but I thought part of the reason for them was because people in wealthy communities like this wanted more exacting control over things like zoning. I've never been to Sea Cliff, but I'm not sure that cutting through red tape is necessarily what voters there would want.
posted by smelendez at 4:29 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

I legitimately don’t know what is satire any more
posted by St. Peepsburg at 4:53 PM on March 19 [32 favorites]

nuts!
posted by clavdivs at 4:59 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

Speaking with an authority that only he recognized …

oof
posted by scruss at 5:04 PM on March 19 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure that cutting through red tape is necessarily what voters there would want.

At least one seems to want it without a clear idea of whether this asshole is totally the right man for the job:

Natasha Kosnac, an accountant, who declined to say how she voted, said she agreed with Mr. Ehrlich that village life was encumbered by too much red tape. His unconventional candidacy, she said, was “bringing light” to Sea Cliff. “I don’t know,” she said. “He could be good.”

This is how we end up where we are, when LIVs say things like "I dunno man maybe this unconventional outsider will shake things up" while shrugging moronically.
posted by axiom at 5:14 PM on March 19 [29 favorites]

#christwhatanasshole
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:17 PM on March 19 [10 favorites]

I thought part of the reason for them was because people in wealthy communities like this wanted more exacting control over things like zoning. Carving out all-white school districts has been the most common use of villages in the past 75 years or so.

My first inkling that Pirates Booty was sus came years ago when they released their low-carb version and called “girlfriend booty”, but I didn’t know it was this bad.
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:03 PM on March 19 [7 favorites]

Mr. Ehrlich, 66, was invoking a 2009 state law that empowers residents to dissolve their town or reformulate it. The first step is to gather signatures from 10 percent of the town’s voters. Mr. Ehrlich waved an envelope that he claimed held 1,800 signatures. He declined to show them to anyone because he said the signers were afraid of retribution.

oh, I see. carry on, all seems to be in order.

Painting the current administration as calcified and no fun

As we all know, the most important thing about your town government is whether it's fun.
posted by BungaDunga at 6:08 PM on March 19 [11 favorites]

Is it by chance that 15 out of 17 products on the first page I came to use the word "white" in relation to the snacks?
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 6:40 PM on March 19 [2 favorites]

Please tell me November, Mattie, and Reilly will make a No Gods No Mayors ep on this guy. I think Mattie has to be mayor of said ep due to regional domain expertise.
posted by drowsy at 6:42 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

Guys like this usually want to be mayor because the current administration won't let their business do something he wants to do, or is enforcing a law or regulation against him.
posted by jamjam at 6:46 PM on March 19 [12 favorites]

At first I thought, geeze the Trump admin sure is emboldening rich assholes to think they can do it too.

But after reading the whole thing I really just think this guy is having a manic episode.

He got more than 1,000 people to come out to vote against him - in a a town of 5,000 people - where the incumbent mayor won the previous election with 182 votes - and was the only candidate on the ballot. That's something, I guess.
posted by subdee at 7:10 PM on March 19 [13 favorites]

My first inkling that Pirates Booty was sus came years ago when they released heir low-carb version and called “girlfriend booty”

Ew.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:16 PM on March 19 [3 favorites]

As we all know, the most important thing about your town government is whether it's fun.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think an indicator of good local government should be that it is the opposite of fun.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:25 PM on March 19 [9 favorites]

Pirate’s Booty Snacks

As a side note, the green Pirate Booty... nuggets? were unofficially called "Gerbil Puffs" at my local Whole Foods. It seemed representative.
posted by SunSnork at 10:11 PM on March 19

Echoes of Ehrlich Bachman.

You’ll see this turn into an actual movement there before the next election.
posted by Captaintripps at 4:18 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

Ah, the Bob Servant playbook at work again.
posted by aesop at 5:53 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

It turns out that a whole lot of the American political system runs on shared ethical norms, unwritten guidelines, and laws/regulations that only work if people bother to uphold them. It's being proven over and over that if you don't give two shits about any of that, you can do what you want.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:49 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

That’s all political systems. It’s all words on paper and conventions of behaviour. The United States is not unique in that way.
posted by Captaintripps at 7:00 AM on March 20 [2 favorites]

The point I was making is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods about the stability of their government that was transparently not true.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:36 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

Hot take without rtfa or the comments!
He's just angling for a job in the federal government with the other degenerates.
posted by Glinn at 9:17 AM on March 20

Its all going to come to the men with guns, when societies fall apart it always does. It will just take the unbelievably resource wealthy society like this one is a while longer (never mind the vast majority goes to the oligarchs and their sycophants and hanger-oners). This guy is clearly unhinged, but he has money so in America he gets to do whatever the f$#@ he wants and deluded people say "hey this guy who promised to mess everything up could be good".

We're starting to see what that means nationally, so I guess locally it makes sense too.

Damn what a bleak time, and I'm not helping. Optimist assemble and please change everything.
posted by WatTylerJr at 9:55 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

My grandmother lived in Sea Cliff for something like forty years. I have lots and lots of memories of visiting her there, ranging from some of my own earliest memories to bringing our first child there to visit. Sea Cliff was always a friendly, sleepy little place that seemed like a perfect place for your grandparent to live.

She would have been utterly disgusted by the turn things have taken there (this is the same area where George Santos was elected). I'm glad she didn't live to see it.
posted by nickmark at 10:13 AM on March 20 [3 favorites]

Villages are weird in New York State law because they are inside towns which have their own municipal governments, and towns are inside of counties that also have their own governments.

I live next to a NYS village-within-a-town (at various points I have also been in the village proper and the town). The politics have occasionally been, er, odd, with some minor scandals in re: mayors, but this is definitely more colorful. This particular village predates the town, as far as I know, and it's lower-middle-class to middle-class rather than wealthy; there have been occasional attempts to dissolve it for tax reasons, all of which have collapsed (largely on the basis of policing--the village would lose its dedicated police force and have to rely on the sheriffs). There have been occasional bizarre episodes like this one, when I was living in a house that had the town/village border as its rear property line:

[A VILLAGE TREE falls onto my lawn. I am DISPLEASED.]

ME, TO VILLAGE PUBLIC WORKS: Hey, one of your trees is on my lawn. Can you remove it?
VILLAGE PUBLIC WORKS: Oh, no, that's not our tree--that's [Town]'s tree. Call their Highway Department.
ME, TO TOWN HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT: Your tree, my lawn.
TOWN HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT: Oh, no, thats not our tree--that's [Village's] tree. Call their Public Works Department.
ME: I DO NOT CARE WHOSE TREE THIS IS. IT IS NOT MY TREE. ONE OF YOU IS REMOVING THIS TREE.
posted by thomas j wise at 11:55 AM on March 20 [4 favorites]

Hot take without rtfa or the comments!
He's just angling for a job in the federal government with the other degenerates.
Right? Why not, it worked for the My Pillow guy and Elon Musk!
posted by Don Pepino at 1:43 PM on March 20

Both the New York Times and the NY Post wrote articles rubbernecking this wacky train crash, guess there are some things that can still bring us together.
posted by subdee at 3:17 PM on March 20 [3 favorites]

I lived there for a little while. It's nice. You can walk to the little park at the end of the business street and watch the sun set over Long Island Sound.
posted by hexatron at 4:44 PM on March 20 [1 favorite]

ME: I DO NOT CARE WHOSE TREE THIS IS. IT IS NOT MY TREE. ONE OF YOU IS REMOVING THIS TREE.

Worst "Lorax" fanfic ever.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:05 AM on March 21 [5 favorites]

He already sold the snack company in case anyone was also like, "WTF? I eat this."
posted by Selena777 at 7:44 AM on March 21 [4 favorites]