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Ramble On: Contrary to Popular Belief, You CAN Beat City Hall (video)
Morning thoughts on Zohran Mamdani's shocking defeat of Andrew "Status" Cuomo, and what it means for NYC and the future of U.S. electoral politics
Good morning! Here is today’s ramble:
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And here is the transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. As you’re watching this, it is Friday morning, June 27th. I’m recording it on Thursday evening, June 26th, at 5.30 p.m. in the afternoon.
I want to talk just for a few minutes this week about the mayor’s race, or actually the Democratic primary race for mayor in New York City, which was won, shockingly, by Zohran Mamdani, who is young and being painted as some sort of Communist / socialist / Muslim / terrorist / anti-Semite / radical / weirdo—whatever words you want to use—by both the Republicans and also by Democrats. And yet, he somehow managed to win. On a day, by the way, when it was really hot outside and not great weather to go walking around New York to go to the polling place.
A couple of thoughts about this. First of all, we don’t know if he’s going to win, because it’s just the Democratic primary, and it seems like the powers-that-be—and in New York City, there are very powerful powers-that-be—don’t want this guy to be mayor. And they’re going to pull out all the stops to stop it, including possibly running Cuomo again, possibly putting all their support behind Eric Adams, the current mayor of New York, who’s basically an agent of the Turkish government. Famously, his long indictment was brushed to the side by Trump in exchange for letting ICE reign over New York City with impunity. So that guy is a complete scoundrel piece of shit. But if we’re monied people, we’re going to go line up behind Eric Adams again, because God forbid we should have the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist in charge of the biggest city in United States, and the center of its financial power.
Assuming Mamdani wins—which is not a given—I don’t know how great of an actual administrator he’ll wind up being. I think it’s very, very hard to run New York City. I think even somebody like Bloomberg who went in there with fairly high optimism about how easy it was to run something like that, after running all of his businesses, found it to be quite difficult. And that was a guy who—whatever you think about his politics—his business experience and experience running huge corporate enterprises, where there’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of people reporting to him, all that kind of stuff, was extensive. It’s hard. And Mamdani does not have that much experience running anything anywhere close to that size.
He’s made a lot of promises that are going to be expensive to keep. I don’t know how the laws work municipal-wise, if he’s going to be able to keep them, we’ll see. If he’s able to raise taxes on the rich the way he would like to, I think we should. It’s too expensive to live in New York City. It just is for any normal person. It’s just too damn expensive. A one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan costs like what, $5,000 a month or something? It’s ridiculous. Who can afford that—unless you’re an investment banker or a lawyer who serves investment bankers? Or some sort of fancy business executive? And the problem is that then, New York City becomes a city of bankers, which by the way is how it was founded. A corporation founded New York City, not even an actual country.
Cities of bankers are boring. They are dull. The best cities are great because they’re diverse, because there’s a lot of different cultures there. There’s a lot of different things to do. There’s artists, there’s musicians, there’s nightlife, there’s good restaurants, all of that stuff. None of it’s going to be possible if nobody can afford to live in New York City. So it behooves even the moneyed class to, you know, maybe have the rents come down a tiny little bit.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I do know that he’s optimistic, and he thinks he can do a good job. Who am I to say he can’t? We don’t know. It’s an unknown commodity. If you go back and look at the mayors of New York, there’ve been a lot of clunkers, man. It’s a hard job. It is a hard job. It might be the hardest job there is. It might be harder in its own way than being President of the United States.
How he’ll do, if he wins—that’s a local thing. What Mamdani’s victory means in general, to national politics, I think, is potentially cataclysmic because here’s a guy who was given really no chance, who ran on a message of, “I hear you working people and I wanna help you make things more affordable for you.” Whether he can do the things or not, that’s not relevant. He’s running on very, very easy to understand slogans and promises and stuff like that. Which obviously resonated.
Young people really like him. Older people really like him. This kind of, they’re trying to say in the media that there’s some sort of divide between the Jewish community in New York and him, and that’s not exactly true either. If you look at the polling, you know, he has support among Jewish New Yorkers. That’s not a thing.
So how did he win? Young people are very excited by him, first of all. I heard about Mamdani from my friend who’s in his early 30s and has ties to NYC, lived in NNYC, has family in NYC, goes there all the time. And the Millennials and the Gen Zers are really excited about this guy. And they should be. If you listen to Mamdani talk, he sounds like he’s cutting through the bullshit. I don’t know if he is, but he sounds like he is. He sounds super authentic. Like, he’s just talking to you like you’re a normal person, and not like a politician. And I think people are desperate for that. They’re starving for that. That’s what they want. They want authenticity. I don’t even know how important the messaging is as much as the authenticity, right?
So, Jonathan Larsen has a Substack called The Fucking News. That’s the name of his site, The Fucking News, which is a great place to learn about your news, I must say. He wrote something there about AOC that I found interesting because, remember, AOC is one of the only basically Democrats, DC Democrats, whatever you want to call it, who endorsed Mamdani, right? Larsen writes:
OH, AND ABOUT OCASIO-CORTEZ Since the day she first won her own Democratic primary, paving her road to Congress, Republicans — and centrist Dems — have done to her what they’re doing to Mamdani.
So how’s that going?
New polling this month found that Ocasio-Cortez is more popular than Trump. And Vance. And every other Democrat not named Obama.
Not in her district. Not in weirdo, crazy New York City (that reflects America’s diversity better than most red states and has more people than 38 fucking states). Ocasio-Cortez is more popular than every non-Obama Democrat nationally.
And in her home state, after years of Republican attacks, how do Republicans feel about her? After she was first elected, a March 2019 poll found that only 6% of Republicans viewed her positively, while 51% had an unfavorable view.
Polling this April found that 60% now have an unfavorable view…but 21% see her favorably.
So, no, Republican attacks aren’t the problem. Democratic capitulation to Republican attacks are the problem. And if Democrats are going to abandon Vote Blue No Matter Who, they’re going to learn that cuts both ways.
That’s in his piece over on The Fucking News, which is a great Substack you should subscribe to. And I think he’s right. I think people like AOC because she’s genuine. I don’t know if she’s really authentic, but she certainly seems that way. She says things that people think. She communicates it in a way that resonates with people because she doesn’t sound like she’s full of shit all the freaking time. She doesn’t sound like she’s afraid of some polling data, or that she has, like, you know, a focus group in her cerebral cortex that’s running everything she’s doing—like Schumer and these other people, right? Hakeem Jeffries? They can’t get out of their way, these people. They’re so horrifying.
We need more good, authentic leaders. I was going to say “young.,” but they don’t even need to be young. Just authentic, that’s what we want: authentic. Now, to speak to just how out of touch, not just Republicans are, but like the Democratic establishment, because Cuomo is really part of the Dem establishment, right? I’m watching the basketball games over the weekend. I’m watching the Finals. Okay, this is the NBA, which as sports leagues go, is not like baseball and football. It’s a lot more of a liberal, progressive, skewed audience in general.
So I’m watching the basketball game, and these attack ads come on against Mamdani. And here they are, they’re like this, they’re like, Mamdani wants to defend the police, right? And then they show pictures of police officers, looking very much like the same police officers who are helping ICE agents kidnap people that we’ve been looking at on our social media for like the last, what, two months now or whatever. It might as well be footage from Los Angeles.
Mamdani wants to defend the police. And I’m sitting there like, “Yeah, okay, and? And what?” They think that’s the attack ad. They think that him being wanting to defund the police— which isn’t true; I mean, he tweeted it before, but it doesn’t mean he’s not going to go to City Hall and cut all their budget. That’s ridiculous. But the fact that they’re trying to use this scare tactic, like, Defunding the police would be so terrible. Out of touch. Out of touch. It was a ridiculous ad. And I think the attack ads just..they didn’t work. They weren’t working. Nobody watching the basketball game was like, Hey, this Mamdani guy sounds dangerous. I mean: know your audience!
It was like on The Simpsons. One time, Bart Simpson runs for class president against the geeky kid, Martin Prince. There’s a shot down the hallway, and Martin Prince is hanging up a sign that says, A vote for Bart is a vote for Anarchy. And then it pans down the hallway and Bart Simpson is hanging up the exact same sign. A vote for Bart is a vote for Anarchy.
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And it’s like this here. It feels like, Mamdani wants to defund the police. Mamdani wants to raise taxes on rich people to bring down rents for middle class. Like, that’s the best you’ve got?
I hope that whatever happens to him in New York—and again, we don’t know if he’s going to win in November, we don’t know if he’s going to do a fantastic job. If he does win, I hope that he does. He seems like he will, because if you’re good enough to run a campaign this good, you’re probably good enough to, you know, do the actual job, it says here.
But apart from that, I hope that Democrats nationally take something from this, which is that: We want authenticity.
We’re living in a fascist regime right now, practically, right? It’s maddening. Our rights are being taken away by the hour, and the Democrats are just walking around like everything’s normal and we’ll just get ‘em in the midterms—and people don’t want to hear that. It’s gaslighting. It makes everybody crazy.
What we want is somebody authentic, somebody who isn’t afraid to say, “Trump is awful and he’s a fascist and he wants to be a dictator and we have to do everything in our power to stop him.” And then go do the things in your power that can stop him. Don’t vote for his nominees, ever.
The Dems put forth a bill—I thought it was a fake thing that was circulating on Blue Sky, that Representative Green put out a bill to impeach Trump because of the Iran thing: bombing a sovereign nation without declaring anything to Congress. So he puts forth an impeachment bill in the House, and Mike Johnson, to my surprise, allows a vote on it—and most of the Democrats voted it down. Nobody wants that shit! Trump has to go! Don’t worry about the fucking focus groups. Lead us.
So that’s why Mamdani won. He won because he wants to lead us. And that’s what we want. We want someone authentic leading the way. It’s not too much to ask. So please learn from this.
We see it. There are people that are doing it. Jasmine’s doing it. Chris Murphy’s out there doing it. Bernie, Lord knows, is doing it. I have my misgivings about Bernie, but you know, he knows how to do this. So go out there and do it, Democrats. Come on, man.
You know, Chuck Schumer…man. He really needs to go, certainly step down from his role in the Senate. Like he cannot be in the leadership anymore. Just Google “Chuck Schumer Studio 54” and everything just falls into place, right?
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It’s just these people have been in the same really incestuous circles for way too long. They’ve lost touch. We need new, fresh voices in these positions of power so that we can salvage what’s left of our democracy and fend off the fascists. That’s what we need.
So I wish Mamdani luck. Andy Ogles—that’s his name, Ogles, such a great name for a Republican representative; I call him Andy Ogles Women—Andy Ogles has already written a letter to crooked Pam Bondi, who’s, know, the Attorney General that’ll do whatever Trump says—saying that we need to look into his immigration status, Mamdani’s immigration status and sick ICE on him and have him deported. He wasn’t born in the United States, he was born in Uganda.
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So, you know, we’ll see what happens there. But my God, did he hit the hornet’s nest. Both hornets’ nests simultaneously! Good for you, Mr. Mamdani, good for you. If I was in New York City, you’d have my vote.
That’s what I have. It’s nice to see energy like this out there, especially in New York, because we’re going to need it. We’re going to need it bad. So I’m sure we’ll have much more to say on this. I’m sure more stuff is going to come out. Anything this guy’s ever said in his life bad about anything is going to come out. And they’re going to try to attack him.
Is he going to be worse than Eric Adams? Is he going to be worse than Giuliani? Is he going to be worse than Mayor Fernando Wood, who presided over New York City during the conscription riots in 1863 and wanted to establish New York as a free city independent of basically the Union or the Confederacy? I don’t think so. I think it’s going to be fine.
So that’s what I have to say. I hope everyone has a fantastic weekend. Please watch The Five 8 tonight. LB and I will be—we’re gonna be together, which is always fun. I’m sure gonna talk about this and lots of other crazy shit that happened this week.
So in the meantime, thanks for listening and remember: we shall prevail.
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