Until now, we always thought that EX-North Miami Beach Commissioner Paule Villard was the most self-unaware politician in South Florida.

Well, move over, Paule.

Here comes your former colleague, Daniela Jean, who proved, among other things, that she has absolutely no clue how to read a room.

Last Thursday night’s swearing in ceremony of newly elected Commissioners Phyllis Smith and Jay Chernoff, as well as re-elected Commissioner Fortuna Smukler, ushered in a brand new era of transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility for the City of North Miami Beach.

When all the Commissioners took their seats on the makeshift dais in the theater, Jay, Fortuna, and Phyllis each spoke about how they plan to put a stop to the rampant corruption at City Hall.

Each one of them received a standing ovation.

Fortuna hit it out of the park, when five minutes into her speech she apologized for the emotional trauma Commissioner Barbara Kramer suffered for the last two years at the hands of Michael Joseph, McKenzie Fleurimond, Daniela Jean, and especially Paule Villard.

Without mentioning Paule Villard by name, Fortuna then announced to City employees, “If any Commissioner is ever unfair, rude, nasty, or demeaning, you report it.  There is nothing to be scared of.  You do not have to put up with it, and no one here is better than any of you.”

The best part of Fortuna’s speech (minute 10:27) was when she enumerated all the things that are “not happening again” in North Miami Beach beginning with, “four votes, one side.”

MUST WATCH!

Thank you, Fortuna, for finally speaking your mind.

One sign that the new government is going to be a rousing success is that the soon-to-be fired City Manager Arthur “Duke” Sorey’s hand-picked cronies in the Division of Public Affairs & Communications have refused to post any photos or videos of the event on its Facebook page, its Twitter feed, or its Instagram page.

UPDATE:  At 6:30pm, the City FINALLY posted four pictures on its Facebook page, its Twitter feed, and one photo on Instagram.  It only took them four days.  🙄

Before the election, Duke Sorey wasted no time having Public Affairs sharing photos and videos of each and every single event, no matter how insignificant, hosted by Paule and her three co-conspirators on the dais, Michael Joseph, McKenzie Fleurimond, and of course, Daniela Jean.

His refusal to even acknowledge the swearing in ceremony is clearly intended to be a retaliatory slap in the face of Mayor Anthony DeFillipo (as usual), and the newly minted City Commission for having the audacity to stop Duke’s gravy train dead in its tracks.

And make no mistake, this was a direct attack on the Mayor and new Commissioners because Duke has to know his job is on the chopping block.

Not that an imminent pink slip has anything to do with the utter contempt he has displayed toward both the Mayor and former Commissioner Barbara Kramer since the day he was hired to serve solely at the pleasure of four Commissioners whose only goal was to turn North Miami Beach into their own lucrative playground for power.

Make no mistake, this crap is going to stop in short order.

We’ll have much more to say about Duke’s despicable reign of terror in a future blog, but we mention this to partially explain Daniela Jean’s defiant, racist, and condescending speech designed to deliberately spoil the joyful celebration of one of the City’s most historic elections.

She literally shocked everyone in the audience.

Everyone!

From the moment she grabbed the microphone and demanded that the audience greet her loudly with, “Good evening,” we knew this would be no ordinary speech.

In fact, it was quite awful.

WATCH!

Daniela first gratuitously thanked “outgoing Commissioner Barbara Kramer,” adding, “Learned a lot from you watching you on this dais,” lying through a Cheshire cat grin.

She quickly segued into, “I also learned A LOT [emphasis Daniela’s] from Commissioner Paule Villard, as well, who’s not here with us tonight.”

Talk about a face palm moment!

Considering that Paule Villard was literally the worst elected official ever (not to mention the least intelligent), we have no idea what she could have possibly taught Daniela Jean other than how to lie, cheat, steal, and cry that the “white man” really didn’t win the election.

What a role model, huh?

When Daniela continued, however, it became apparently that the most important thing Paule taught Daniela was how to be a hypocrite and how to play the race card.

She welcomed the new Commissioners with, “It’s going to be interesting to see how you govern with diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Wow!

We can tell you that their governing style won’t include Daniela’s warped idea of “diversity,” which to her means an all black (preferably Haitian) workforce.  This is the exact opposite of actual diversity.

We can also tell you that “equity” does not mean equality, where everyone is given the same opportunities and resources to achieve success to the best of their abilities.  “Equity,” on the other hand, promotes the false concept that members of a certain race can only achieve success if the bar is lowered.  Or, as the esteemed African American economist, academic, and author Glenn C. Loury coined it, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

And finally, we can’t help but wonder if Daniela’s idea of  “inclusion” is sponsoring the vast majority of City events and programs geared to only one segment of the City’s residents, while ignoring the fact that North Miami Beach is made up of an almost equal number of whites and blacks, and that at 38%, Hispanics represent the largest ethnic group.

Daniela Jean is hardly in a position to be preaching “diversity, equity, and inclusion” to anyone, much less to all the non-Haitian residents who have been neglected by their own local government for the last two years.

She also tried to defend the indefensible by saying, “The City has not fallen apart in the last two years, contrary to popular belief.”

Au contraire mon ami!

Hate to break it to you, Daniela.  Based on the election results, “popular belief” spoke quite loudly.

It’s also evident that ever since Daniela was recruited to run by her co-conspirators for the sole purpose of creating a “Haitian majority” on the dais, the City has become a train wreck due to complete lack of transparency, wasteful spending, nepotism, corruption, Charter violations, abuse of position, and outright criminality!

If Daniela is so blind that she can’t see that reality in front of her, maybe having Paule Villard as a mentor was not exactly the wisest choice.

Then again, before two years ago Daniela’s only experience in government was her 8-year “career” as a low-level administrative employee in the City of North Miami … where terminal stupidity was invented.  Yet suddenly, Daniela thinks she’s the Nancy Pelosi of North Miami Beach.

Her ignorance was on full display during her speech when she said, “I’ll follow your leaderships as the only black female on this dais…”

Oh, Daniela, honey.  You’re not that special.

If you want to play that game, keep in mind that you’re sitting on a dais with:

• Mayor Tony DeFillipo, the only Italian Cuban male;
• Commissioner Smukler, the only Cuban Jewish female;
• Jay Chernoff, the only white Jewish male; and
• Phyllis Smith, the only white Jewish female, and who can rock the color yellow like nobody’s business.

The only members of the Commission who are less unique than all the others are the two black males, Michael Joseph and McKenzie Fleurimond, so there’s that.

Oh, and by the way, Daniela, stop with the identity politics already.

Segregation ended in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Frantz Pierre tried that tactic a decade ago.  It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now.

Nonplussed, Daniela continued by stupidly saying, “I will yield to leadership based on age,” and expressed her “hope” to the new Commissioners that “you lead by example and that the fruits of your work will definitely benefit everyone in this community equally.”

Not a problem.

We can guarantee that they won’t make the same mistakes that Daniela, Paule, Michael, and McKenzie made by benefiting only themselves and the 19% of North Miami Beach residents they “worked for,” to the exclusion of those who “don’t look like them.”

Daniela also had the audacity to say, “I hope that we can move forward without antagonizing each other.  I hope that we can move forward without belittling and patronizing each other.”

Seriously, Daniela.?

Are you talking about the way that way Paule Villard and Michael Joseph antagonized, belittled, and patronized Commissioner Barbara Kramer?

Or were you referring to the way McKenzie Fleurimond and City “Attorney” Hans Ottinot took turns antagonizing, belittling, and patronizing Mayor Tony DeFillipo?

Is that what you meant by “leading by example?”

Seems legit.

Daniela closed her ridiculous diatribe by nervously cackling as she said, “I’ll be watching you four!”

Oh, okay.

We’re old enough to remember that time Daniela chastised Fortuna Smukler for being “racist” at the February 15, 2022 City Commission Meeting, simply for saying the word “they” when referring to “the four of you” who vote in lock step with each other.

That was also the meeting when Paule proposed a censure and falsely accused Barbara Kramer of “racism” for things she didn’t say.

Is that also “leading by example,” Daniela?

As if she didn’t already make the point the first time, Daniela closed by reminding them, “I’ll be following you four because you guys have almost a century of experience.”

A “century of experience?”

Does she realize that a century is, like, 100 years?

Let’s do the math.

Tony has been an elected official since 2011, so he has nine years of experience.

Phyllis served from 2007 to 2020, so that’s thirteen years.

Jay served from 1989 to 2009, or twenty years.

And Fortuna has only served four years so far.

I added those up on my handy-dandy calculator and came up with a grand total of 46 years, which according to our calculations, doesn’t even come close to “a century of experience.”

Buy, hey …

When Daniela finally wrapped up her hateful diatribe, there was no standing ovation.

In fact, the awkward silence was deafening.

For future reference, Daniela might want to learn how to play to her audience.

She also might want to learn how to correctly pronounce the word “dais.”

For the record, Daniela, it’s not “die-us.”

WATCH AND LEARN!

“And now you know.”

After shocking everyone in the auditorium with her accusatory, petulant, and yes, racist speech, Daniela took off for an event at the Perez Art Museum, as evidenced by her Instagram post, where she complained that the swearing in ceremony was “one of the hardest meetings of my life.”

We can’t help but wonder what was so hard for her?  Being forced to sit on a dais with people who “don’t look like her?”  Or maybe realizing she can’t “rule” with a majority voting bloc anymore?

Either way, she better learn to deal with it the same way Tony, Barbara, and Fortuna had to deal with having bad legislation shoved down their throats without so much as a discussion since she was elected.

And the same way they abused their majority voting bloc to keep holding Commission meetings in the theater, where they can be perched high on a stage and sneer down their noses at the lowly residents they have silenced for the last two years.

In fact, Daniela is so incensed that as of December 20, 2022, the Commission meetings will now be moved back into the Commission Chambers where they belong, that she emailed Duke the very next day to insist that partitions be installed on the dias [sic] because “she doesn’t feel safe.”

Funny how she “can not in good conscious [sic] re-enter without such measures.”

Yet somehow, her “good conscience” (apparently, spelling is even harder than math) felt safe enough to attend the City of Miami’s 17th Annual Holiday Gala on Saturday, December 3, 2022, with no partitions.

And no masks.

We suspect that Daniela is merely looking for an excuse not to attend the December 20th meeting because, well, meetings are just so hard for her.

For the last two years, we held out hope that Daniela Jean might be the only one of “the four” who was reasonable — and intelligent — enough to break away from the pack and start thinking for herself.

Clearly that’s not the case.

She’s just as racist and ignorant as Paule, Michael, and McKenzie.

And since meetings are just so hard for her to attend, we will do everything in our power in two years to relieve her of the burden.

Stephanie