Latest Doug Polk Publicity Stunt Involves Unseating Vegas’ Mayor

Doug Polk has filed for the recall of Las Vegas mayor Carolyn Goodman in response to her calls to reopen Las Vegas.

Goodman wants to salve the economic disaster that has hit Las Vegas by opening up the casinos, hotels, and convention centres. No doubt this would be a truly terrible idea.

Goodman made her case poorly in an embarrasing interview with Anderson Cooper who shot her down, argument by argument. The governor of Nevada subsequently confirmed said he will not allow Goodman to open Las Vegas ahead of the rest of the country.

Game over.

Except not quite. Doug Polk, seeing an opportunity to grab a few extra hits for his coaching site, put in the work to file a petition calling for Goodman’s recall. 

He followed this up with a long and self-congratulatory video in which he re-edited the interview with Goodman and parroted Anderson Cooper’s line as commentary.

Las Vegas, being a city built on the tourism and hospitality industries, has been particularly hard hit by the shutdown. According to the mayor in just under two months there have been more unemployment claims filed than “any FULL calendar year in the city’s history”. 

According to Goodman’s Twitter account, the claims alone represent 25% of the city’s workforce and do not include those who have not been able to file a claim through the city’s overworked systems.

What we are seeing in Las Vegas is what happens when governments decry government spending as “theft”, a decent minimum wage as “bad for business”, and welfare as nothing more than free money for “scroungers”.

Polk’s callous publicity stunt ignores all that, skipping over the very real problem of lockdown induced poverty in Las Vegas. On the other hand, the mayor’s empty statements cast her as the saviour of the working classes without actually helping them.

Neither seems to be able to see past profit and popularity and the result is a lot of sound and fury that signifies absolutely bupkis.