"Tonight we made history," grinned Zohran Mamdani as his supporters cheered with delight, "I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City. His victory over disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo in this primary election has made Mamdani, the 33-year-old fresh-faced Indian Muslim assemblyman from Queens, into a national sensation—and one of the biggest news stories in the week when Trump bombed Iran's nuclear facilities.
He's used his eloquent, telegenic charisma to make a principled stand for Democratic socialist policies, call for Palestinian human rights, and propose a radical re-envisioning of policing in his city. Which of course makes him the target of conspiracy-mongers and right-wing propagandists, as well establishment Democrats and supporters of Israel.
As masked ICE thugs, cynical SCOTUS enablers, movie-villain oligarchs, and MAGA cult ghouls steadily dismantle democracy we'll discuss the Mamdani Effect. Is he the hero we've been hoping for, or are his hard-left positions corrosive to a broader anti-Trump coalition?
Show Notes
NYC Councilman Brad Lander Is ‘Glad’ To Belong To A Shul That Promotes Toeiva; Adds That Israel Is ‘Occupying’ West Bank
Defund the Police? Turning a Slogan into Policy - Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
Reimagining a More Equitable Policing and Public Safety System in New York City
Seven Facts About the NYPD Budget
After Winning NYC's Democratic Mayoral Primary, Zohran Mamdani Reaffirms Support For Reparations
NYC mayoral candidate Zahron Mamdani vows to 'expand and protect' trans healthcare
Democratic NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Is Pledging $65 Million for Trans Health Care
Divine Shawarma: NYPD Officer's Halal Lunch Break
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
She was a decorated veteran, a Marine who saved her comrades, a hero.
She was stoic, modest, tough, someone who inspired people.
Everyone thought they knew her until they didn't.
I remember sitting on her couch and asking her, is this real?
Is this real?
I just couldn't wrap my head around what kind of person would do that to another person that was getting treatment, that was, you know, dying.
This is a story that is all about trust and about a woman named Sarah Kavanaugh.
I've always been told I'm a really good listener, right?
And I maximized that while I was lying.
Listen to DeepCover, The Truth About Sarah, wherever you get your podcasts.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
Hot Money Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Thank you.
Conspirituality 264, the Mamdani Effect.
Tonight, we made history, grinned Zoran Mamdani as his supporters cheered with delight.
I will be your Democratic nominee for the mayor of New York City.
His victory over disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo in this primary election has made Mamdani, the 33-year-old fresh-faced Indian Muslim assemblyman from Queens, into a national sensation and one of the biggest news stories in the week when Trump bombed Iran's nuclear facilities.
That and Zoran's eloquent telegenic charisma, he's used those gifts to make a principled stand for democratic socialist policies, call for Palestinian human rights, and propose a radical re-envisioning of policing in his city.
Which, of course, makes him the target of conspiracy mongers and right-wing propagandists, as well as establishment Democrats and supporters of Israel.
Today, as masked ICE thugs, cynical SCODIS enablers, movie villain oligarchs, and MAGA cult ghouls steadily dismantle democracy, we'll discuss the Mamdani effect.
Is he the hero we've been hoping for, or are his hard-left positions corrosive to a broader anti-Trump coalition?
But first, Derek covers how RFK Jr.'s anti-science instincts are now endangering the lives of children around the world.
Who could have guessed?
This week in spirituality.
Well, we're recording this episode on Tuesday, just after Trump's bill has passed and is inevitable now, which of course will remove up to 11 million people off of Medicare and reduce funding for SNAP by billions of dollars.
I'm wondering how RFK Jr. is going to spin that because all of his talk about SNAP is how good that they're removing soda from the pores.
Now, a few months ago, we floated the idea of making his tenure leading America's public health system as a weekly update.
And I did want to pursue this because I wanted to avoid Maha fatigue.
But this last week and a half has been an absolute shit show.
Upon assuming office, Kennedy promised to elevate his agency's science to be gold standard.
What does that mean?
That everything passing through his purview would be subjected to rigorous randomized control trials and everyone would be transparent with the evidence.
And if you think people who talk a lot of shit instead of actually doing a lot of shit is applicable here, you've just nailed the reality of Maha.
The illusion of the gold standard was quickly dispelled with his monumental commission report that was riddled with AI-generated fake studies.
His agency corrected the report only to make more errors.
When he was confronted in front of Congress, Kennedy admitted he never fact-checked the report.
A day later, a CDC presentation included a non-existent study.
And of course, he fired all members of ASIP, the vaccine advisory board, to install his lackeys, one of whom has already quit.
The others voted against using flu vaccines that contain the rarely used preservative thimerosol.
Then there's a SCOTIS ruling from last week, which upheld Obamacare, which is a good thing, but there's more to it.
The case was Kennedy versus Braidwood management.
And the case was actually brought by Braidwood, which is a group of Christian-owned businesses who wanted to challenge the constitutionality of insurers providing no-cost preventive care.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
They were saying that it would be unconstitutional for insurers to make business decisions about how they're going to cover people?
No, they don't like the part of Obamacare where you have to provide care if someone needs it.
Oh, yeah, fuck that.
For preventive issues, right?
So if you need some sort of screening that has to be covered.
You know, the Christians, the good charitable ones, they don't want to cover that.
Yeah.
No way.
No.
In the process of actually going with Kennedy on this side, a controversial point about the Preventative Services Task Force was made.
And this is the body that mandates insurance coverage for preventive treatments.
Before this case, the panel was independent, but now it's entirely under the discretion of Kennedy.
It gives him much more power over what can be covered as preventive and what should not be covered.
Oh, God.
An example, the conservative Braidwood team loads something called PREP, P-R-E-P, which prevents HIV infection.
We know Kennedy is a longtime AIDS denialist, you know, the poppers causes AIDS guy.
So that could now simply be removed from coverage if he wants it gone.
He could also add Ivermectin to the list if he wants to.
So none of this has been mentioned by Kennedy, to be clear, but he now solely has that power, as does every HHS secretary moving forward, which is not a good thing.
Then, this is the one I really wanted to get to.
Kennedy announced that America will no longer contribute $1.6 billion to Gavi, the vaccine alliance.
If you don't know about this alliance, since 2000, the public-private organization has immunized over a billion children in low- and middle-income nations, and they've saved millions of lives.
Now, why is Kennedy removing funding?
He released a video in which he cited a 2017 observational study in Guinea-Bissau, which used data on children receiving the DTP vaccine during the early 1980s and whose own authors said that randomized control trials, you know, the gold standard shit, should be conducted to prove causality, which their study does not do.
The WHO gave the same advice, especially considering there are confounding factors like the fact that the children in the study were likely malnourished.
All the study found was that children who received the DTP vaccine were more likely to die than unvaccinated children due to all-cause mortality, not to the vaccine itself.
And so that makes it correlative at best.
Yeah.
And what this does is it calls back to the DTP controversy in the U.S., which is when you get the beginning of the surcharge and the vaccine court and all of this stuff to try to manage the fact that there were all of these completely anti-science court cases going against the vaccine manufacturers.
Right.
And he even kind of addresses this because in his video, he says the DTAP vaccine, which most of us use in developed nations, is far superior.
Now, that might be true, but he really leans on the fact that this observational study was conducted by his words, vaccine gurus.
I thought he liked gurus in general.
But he apparently likes the vaccine gurus now.
He blames Gavi for not updating this one vaccine, and that is why he is withholding funding, or so he says.
This could result in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths in countries that already have higher mortality rates.
He keeps referring to the researchers' supposed stature in the vaccine world in order to deflect from the caveats of the research.
Now, if using a study on malnourished children in Africa sounds familiar, that's because Kennedy's response to the measles outbreak in Texas, in which he recommended using vitamin A in the form of cod liver oil, is based on a 1991 study on 60 poor malnourished children in South Africa.
That recommendation ended up sending American children to the hospital with vitamin A toxicity because they weren't malnourished African children, so macrodosing vitamin A might not have been the right protocol for them.
The MMR vaccine would have been, however.
Gold standard.
Gold standard.
We're looking at just observational study in an RCT that are 30 to 40 years old on African children.
And that is what Kennedy's using for cover to continue his anti-vax agenda.
And it's incredible to me that he's just laying all this shit out for everyone to see in public, but it's not surprising because that's what he's done with children's health defense on the anti-vax circuit for years.
It's just that he was never in charge of anything except his nonprofit, in which he was making millions of dollars in speaking fees, book deals, and lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
So we know his promise of gold standard science was always a joke, but now it's putting the lives of millions of children across the planet in danger.
And the worst possible scenario is speeding right at us.
And all his stands on social media are doing is focusing on food dyes and seed oils as the people they never cared about in the first place continue to suffer.
You know, there's one silver lining, maybe, which is that he is who he is.
He hides nothing and that makes him predictable at least.
And, you know, I think someday, speaking of things hurtling towards us, they're going to make a film about you, Derek, modeled on Don't Look Up.
But it's not going to be an asteroid.
It's going to be this like huge ass coronavirus globule just hurtling towards your head.
Well, who's going to play me?
How about Pedro Pascal?
I know we don't look alike, but I just like him.
Let's do it.
Let's give him a call.
Let's give him a call.
Did it occur to you that he charmed you in any way?
Yes, it did.
But he was a charming man.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story because this ties together the Cold War with the new one.
I often ask myself, now, did I know the true Jan at all?
Listen to Hot Money, Agent of Chaos, wherever you get your podcasts.
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We look into the startling maw of our culture and try to figure something out.
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Maybe it's just kind of a trend.
And we expand it across culture as kind of a pattern or a template.
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New episodes drop every Thursday.
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For Zoran Mamdani and his passionate supporters, his win in the Democratic primary last week is historic.
He said so from the podium and then quoted none other than Nelson Mandela saying, it always seems impossible until it is done.
Quite bold.
The words I've seen the most in headlines reporting on this is seismic.
Comparisons with the rise of Barack Obama and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez abound, along with the promise of a new, authentic populist-left politics of affordability that might win back defectors to MAGA.
But more moderate Democrats worry that his policy proposals are unrealistic and may even plunge New York into economic disaster if applied.
And Republicans see a socialist who wants to seize the means of production and soft pedal support for Hamas.
So he's got a minefield ahead, but whatever happens, the Mamdani effect is real.
I think there's a lot to explore.
And that's a good word, because whatever may come of this, I think this moment is unfolding in a new territory, or at least a territory we are, a lot of us are trying to struggle to remember.
And I think Naomi Klein nailed it with the mirror world metaphor last year.
But she was also describing something that has loomed over us for a dog's age, which is politics reduced to culture war bullshit on the screen in your pocket, where words supersede actions, where memes overcome experience.
But I see in this campaign what happens when the real world kind of reasserts itself through the daily material needs of the common people of the city, like daycare, transit, housing, human rights, people who love their immigrant neighbors, people who want to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who were once ancient enemies.
So, yeah, in the March to November and the general election for mayor, I think New Yorkers, and not just living in the city, but also, you know, around the world, because a lot of people are like claiming some sort of, I don't know, homesickness for this, around this event, including me, I think we're all in for four months of stupid debate on how communist or fanatically Muslim Mandani is.
But beyond, you know, the phoning and the door knocking on the streets, all of that will continue.
And more and more young people, I think, are opening doors to talk about the nuts and bolts of their lives.
Homesickness is a good word.
I mean, I lived under the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.
So I was very much in the Republican era of New York City politics.
But also understanding, like, as I'm watching everything unfold, from my perspective, we have to balance the sort of romanticized image of New York as this perfect melting pot, which it absolutely is not.
But yet it also gives you exposure in a way most other cities will never be able to accomplish, which residents, myself, a former one, very much appreciate.
When you can be on a subway car and hear six, eight different languages going at once, that is a net positive.
But as we know in this America, that is usually seen as something to be scared of.
And I just want to point out as we go into this, though, that we talk about politics a lot on this podcast.
I cut my teeth as a political reporter in the 90s, but most of my career has not been in political reporting.
We don't spend our time doing survey data, policy analysis, the study of bureaucracy.
As citizens and as people who have different roles in media, we do have thoughts on politics, however.
So just want to be clear where we're coming from.
And I think there's value to it.
I'm not trying to denounce it because I listen to a lot of political analysis and sometimes I'm screaming at my phone while I'm here listening to them in my podcasts.
But, you know, I just want to be clear because we don't usually do straight political shows.
And I just wanted to lay context for how we're approaching this.
Yeah, absolutely.
And yes, to what you said about New York.
I mean, New York City's iconic status as this quintessential American example of, you know, a city with all sorts of different people living together and breathing the same air and, you know, engaging in whatever is left of what we think of as the American dream is very strong.
And so I'm with you, Matthew, that everything you talked about in terms of those material concerns and engaging with the reality of the people there is very, very exciting.
I'm going to argue today that a key reason that as a Muslim democratic socialist, anti-Zionist, Zoran Mamdani was able to win is because he's an immensely talented political communicator.
I think he had to walk an incredible tightrope, staying true to his values while learning along the way in real time.
And he dealt with incredibly loaded topics in nuanced, empathic, and intelligent ways.
And I have some clips.
So let's start with his appearance alongside Brad Lander, as it turns out, on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on June 23rd, which is literally the day before the election.
Given that Mamdani has been an outspoken critic of Israel and has publicly defended the slogan, globalize the Intifada, and has also been the target of political smears that have falsely called him anti-Semitic, Colbert asked him what he would say to Jewish New Yorkers who might be afraid that he would not protect them from very real anti-Semitic violence and wouldn't serve them if he was elected.
So here's his answer to that question.
You know, I know where that fear is coming from.
It's a fear that is based upon the horrific attacks we've seen in Washington, D.C., in Boulder, Colorado.
All the way from Jews Will Not Replace Us to today.
And it's a fear that I hear also from New Yorkers themselves.
You know, just a few days after the horrific war crime of October 7th, a friend of mine told me about how he went to his synagogue for Shabbat services and he heard the door open behind him and a tremor went up his spine as he turned around not knowing who was there and What they meant for him.
I spoke to a Jewish man in Williamsburg just months ago who told me that the door he left unlocked for decades is now one that he locks.
And ultimately, this is because we're seeing a crisis of anti-Semitism.
And that's why, at the heart of my proposal for a Department of Community Safety, is a commitment to increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800%.
Because to your point, anti-Semitism is not simply something that we should talk about, it's something that we have to tackle.
We have to make clear there's no room for it in this city, in this country, in this world.
There's no justification for violence of any kind.
No, there is no room for violence in this city, in this country, in this world.
I think it's a really brilliant answer because he leads with empathy.
He doesn't fall into whataboutism.
He gives specific information on a policy he would implement.
And to recap, he lists recent anti-Semitic attacks.
He refers to October 7th as a horrific war crime.
He affirms he sees no room for political violence and says he will dramatically increase the budget for tackling hate crimes, while neatly then tying it back to his Department of Community Safety proposal, which is about reworking the policing budget.
Yeah, so I want to, in a bit, I want to come back to whether and how he defended the slogan, globalize the intifada, in a bit, because that's actually what happens before his appearance on Colbert, and that's part of what's being referred to.
And also, you know, to talk about the burden of micromanaging ideas against reality and speech against genocide, because all of that's really nuanced.
But what I find remarkable about that is that, you know, in phrases like no room for violence in our city, the country of the world, I hear a bit of a side eye at the IDF there, right?
And then with regard to learning, his first answer early in the campaign to this thought-terminating question of, does Israel have a right to exist?
He says, Israel has a right to exist as a state with equal rights.
So good.
Yeah.
I mean, and it's like you add a bar or a threshold to it that who would argue with?
And then on Colbert, he refines this to, yes, like all nations, I believe it has a right to exist and a responsibility also to uphold international law.
So like 10 out of 10.
And what he very importantly is doing without compromising any of his following or support from his side is that he's avoiding the DSA type rhetoric of like, are you fucking insane?
You think that an ethnostate has a right to exist or is a good thing.
But to my ear, that subtext in the organizing culture that he's coming from is in there.
He's just not saying it.
One thing that he's consistently doing, which is sort of holding up a mirror to how so many of MAGA politicians and politicians across the spectrum, but specifically in the last decade, MA politicians have done is not answer a question directly.
And I actually don't mind that.
I do, there might be more nuance as we get more into like certain topics that he's discussing.
But at the same time, his redirection into what he's talking about is something the left has failed at, at least the Democratic Party for a long time, and the right has just trounched journalists at.
So just purely in terms of rhetorical technique, I'm really appreciating how he's presenting himself.
Yeah, he is refusing often the framing of the question.
He's stepping past it and he's answering what he needs to answer.
Sometimes.
I mean, but that's also different than what MAGA does.
So to be clear, because MAGA just doesn't want to answer anything around, so they'll usually deflect completely.
He is hitting the broad parameters, sometimes they're freezing the questions.
Sometimes he's doing a bit of sidestepping.
Yeah, it's super skillful, in my opinion.
So speaking of that Department of Community Safety proposal, Colbert asked him next about his relationship to the police, which is a way of referring to his controversial support of the slogan, defund the police, in online posts going back to the summer of 2020.
It's a relationship where when I've had conversations with rank and file officers who've told me that they joined the police force to tackle serious crimes, I've heard their frustrations that they've instead been asked to play almost every single role that city government can imagine.
The same people who thought they were signing up to deal with shootings are instead playing the roles of mental health professionals and social workers.
And ultimately, it's part of why we see 200 officers leave the department every single month, with about a quarter considering doing so, because we're not letting them do their actual jobs.
And that's part of our vision.
Let the police do the critical work that they do towards creating public safety.
Let's create a department of community safety to have dedicated teams of mental health outreach workers and social workers in our subways responding to homelessness and the mental health crisis.
Yeah, again, I mean, he succinctly outlines the problem as he sees it through the eyes of the cops he's talked to.
Then he advocates for division of labor, mental health professionals and social workers, based on qualifications and training, while still affirming the need for the critical work of the actual police.
He did this really well from the debate stage two earlier in the month, saying, I will not defund the police.
I will work with the police because I believe that the police have a critical role to play in creating public safety.
He said 65% of crimes in the first quarter of this year are still not solved.
We need to ensure police can focus on these crimes and we have mental health professionals and social workers who can address and tackle and resolve the mental health crisis.
You know, again, what stands out to me is that his mainstream effective political answers seem to be built on what he sends to the background without alienating his support base.
Like he's been a member of DSA since 2017.
I'll get to that in a bit.
But I think it's skillful that he pings cops off the top in his answers.
But I would also say that no one gets to the reasoning that he lays out or the ability to express it intelligently without years in an abolitionist conversation about the nature of policing in general.
And that's a central pillar of the DSA, which is the backbone of his volunteer team, where the fieldwork on that is the lived experience of police in marginalized communities, where some researchers argue that outfits like the NYPD spend a lot of time criminalizing poverty or substance dependency, and there's high arrest rates for low-level offenses, and that actually erodes trust in the police that the police are not trusted.
So in talking about allocating police resources more appropriately, a lot of his supporters will also hear, or they'll mutter silently, yeah, they shouldn't be hammering on student protesters in riot gear either.
And then there's also this note of empathy for cops not being able to solve 65% of crimes.
And I think some people will hear a kind of veiled criticism that job performance is low, despite overall funding going up by like 34% between 2010 and 2020.
Yeah, and they definitely should not be hammering on student protesters in riot gear.
It's absolutely appalling.
So I did say earlier on in this segment that I feel like Mamdani was learning in real time just based on what I saw him doing from the stage in response to these kinds of questions.
Here's an example of him being extremely careful in dealing with the question about his defense, and I'll back up why I'm still comfortable calling it that like a lot of media outlets have, of globalized the fada.
And this came up frequently at press conferences.
So Brad Lander, the New York City controller, whom many listeners will have seen being arrested by ICE as he attempted to escort someone out of immigration court just a week before the election, was also running for the nomination.
And as we mentioned, he lent his kind of Jewish middle-aged establishment legitimacy to Mamdani via a generous cross-endorsement with him, which is really cool to see.
And so earlier in the day, before what we're about to hear, he had separately responded to a question about Zoran's comments regarding globalize the Intifada by saying it was hard for him not to hear the slogan as meaning open season on Jews.
And then he reflected on recent anti-Semitic attacks.
But he said he trusted that Mamdani would protect all New Yorkers.
And those comments are referenced here in the question as it's put to Zoran.
And my apologies here for the outdoor background noise.
This clip is a tiny bit longer, but I didn't want to edit out his pauses because I hear him really carefully trying to find the right words.
I've heard the comments from Mr. Lander, and ultimately, this is something that I have heard from a number of New Yorkers about concerns that they have and concerns for their safety.
And I've made clear that as mayor, I will protect Jewish New Yorkers.
As mayor, I will ensure that those Jewish New Yorkers are just as safe as every other New Yorker's.
And what that means is standing up for Jewish New Yorkers.
It means tackling anti-Semitism as the crisis that it is in this city.
My point is not that this is language that I use.
It is a larger point about the nature in which the meaning of these words, these words have different meaning for many different people.
And my point is rather to say that each and every New Yorker deserves that safety and that my focus is going to be on making this an affordable city.
The language that I use is going to be language that is clear and language that speaks directly to the concerns of New Yorkers.
So I really hear someone there thinking very carefully in real time about how he wants to respond.
And he ends up landing on this is not language I use.
The language I use will be clear and speak directly to the concerns of New Yorkers.
I hear him acknowledging that it may be imprecise language that can be interpreted to endorse violence and that he does not endorse violence of any kind.
And he's vowing to speak himself in unambiguous language.
He was asked a question like this when he appeared on Pod Save America, and he gave another great answer saying, I've called October 7th a horrific war crime.
I've condemned Hamas again and again.
I believe international law is the way to create a better future with universal human rights that apply to all people, including Israelis and Palestinians.
I think his comments on the bulwark are really important to highlight.
So I've got them here.
He says, I know people for whom those things, so he's talking about the phrase, globalize the intifada, for whom those things mean very different things.
And to me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.
And I think what's difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto uprising into Arabic because it's a word that means struggle.
And as a Muslim man who grew up post-9-11, I'm all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.
And I think that's where it leaves me with the sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe.
And the question of the permissibility of language is something that I haven't ventured into.
So that set off the firestorm, actually, that he had to respond to.
That's part of why he's facing those questions on Colbert and why he's giving that sort of reiteration of those values on the street in that clip that we played.
And I think that it gives a sense of just how much he's up against, that that, you know, it's probably 150 words or something like that becomes the media cycle for, you know, probably a week or something, the week before he's actually, the contest is actually decided.
And it's going to continue.
It's going to continue.
And, you know, it's kind of incredible how he manages to walk the line through it.
Yeah, absolutely.
It is incredible.
I'll just clarify the timeline here.
On June 12th, he's asked this question by Whitney Tilson at the second debate.
It's on the 17th that he's asked that question by the bulwark that you just gave the answer for.
And then in between, you have those press conferences, one of which we had a little clip of a moment ago.
Oh, it's in between.
Yeah, yeah.
And the Lander statement.
And so for me, by the time he gets to Colbert, he's integrated the Lander statement.
And he's saying, you know, I want to reference these two anti-Semitic attacks that happened in D.C. and in Boulder, Colorado.
And yeah, I just see him figuring out how do I take seriously the concerns that some Jewish New Yorkers may have in terms of my communication strategy?
Well, and also, how does he separate out words from actions?
Because if he condemns it, how does that not spin around?
He made this point in other places.
How does that not spin around and provide support for the MA argument that globalize the intifada is criminal or deportable hate speech?
And how, I think more importantly to anybody who's interested in how he got the support he got is how would he condemn it without throwing many, many allies under the bus?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it's such difficult stuff to talk about.
Like you reference how in that answer, I think he very brilliantly references the Holocaust Museum using the term intifada in terms of how they translate an account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Right.
People who are fighting a genocide.
Into Arabic.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then right after he made that statement on the bulwark, the U.S. Holocaust Museum immediately repudiated him and said, how dare you exploit, they said, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in our museum to try to sanitize the term.
Yeah, to sanitize the term globalized Intifada under whose banner Jews have been attacked and murdered since 1987.
I wonder, because you keep making a very good point, Matthew, about keeping his base and then expanding the base, which is essentially what any good politician wants to do.
So when you come to the Democratic Socialist of America, which is his party, if you go to their homepage right now, you see a photo of him on there.
So apparently he seems representative of it.
And yet in 2023, the party had a bleeding out of older members because hardcore leftists came in and there was some real problems with the party itself not condemning the October 7th attack, while Bernie Sanders and AOC immediately came out and condemned the attack, which then caused members of the party to go against them.
So I'm curious how he's going to try to walk that line where you have his base, this coalition, which has the 16 members have predominantly been taken over by full socialists.
Even at his celebration party, someone came at him, which is, you know, can happen anywhere.
What'd they say?
What did they say?
It's classic.
Oh, this guy came out and he was just saying that any support of Israel whatsoever is Zionism.
You cannot support Israel as a state.
And, you know, what can you do?
Mamdadi did a great job at the moment of trying to calm it down.
But like, that's just one example.
But you're actually talking about a party that has moved hard left.
And now he's going to try to track not center left necessarily, but not hard left.
So that's going to be interesting to see how he weaves that and what kind of support he might potentially lose from his base, his actual political affiliation as he tries to expand his coalition.
Yeah, one of the points I'm going to make later is that all of that stuff is a sign of a vital and visible politics of people who really care about what they're talking about and make firm lines about foreign policy and wealth redistribution.
That's just classic DSA stuff.
There's always internal battles, but it's also visible, right?
It's really bad for coalition building and it's really good for credibility building in terms of like for people who are alienated from political processes or think that it's not really happening on the street or it's not happening in people's church basements or things like that.
That's not what's lacking.
What's lacking is the ability to actually pull together.
As contrasted with backroom democratic deals and shoving out Bernie.
Yeah, exactly.
Or the fact that these guys are able to rally every corpse out of the closet to back Cuomo at the last minute.
Unbelievable.
Like that's not visible.
There's nothing visible about that.
It's absolutely awful.
So before we move on, I just want to say one other thing.
In terms of this language of globalized the intifada, I think many Jewish New Yorkers have good reason to find the term really uncomfortable, so that it is unsettling to them.
There's an organization called Within Our Lifetime, which is headquartered in Brooklyn, which right after the October 7th attacks took to social media to say we must support all forms of Palestinian resistance, no exceptions, no fine print.
Within a month after that, they published a map to social media of New York City that showed the location of Jewish organizations, identified them by saying, know your enemy.
These people have blood on their hands and emblazoned across the top of that map, globalized the Antifada, zone of operations.
Within our lifetime, also have protested the NOVA just a year ago in June of last year, an installation commemorating those who were killed at the Nova Music Festival.
And when they approached that demonstration, they swarmed subway cars reportedly in masks, telling Zionists that they needed to identify themselves.
It's very scary stuff.
And that organization actually has at least five members who've been charged or convicted of assaults on Jews in New York City during demonstrations.
So it's highly charged.
And I know many people may associate globalize the intifada with sort of universalized a call for equality and human rights, but many other people hear it as hearkening back to the second intifada from 2000 to 2005, in which Hamas led 138 suicide bombings, mostly against civilians.
That's the association that people have with it.
One point that Mamdani is making over and over, and I think it's really strong, and it's been made, I mean, you've made it plenty of times, Matthew, is that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are different things.
I think that's really, really pertinent, and especially moving forward.
But having lived in New York and being married into a Jewish family in New York and having so many people that I know and work with, spending a lot of time in those communities, it's sometimes just hard to realize that people, even when they're advocating for anti-Zionism, that it does tip over into anti-Semitism quite quickly.
And that's not something I can even put on Mamdani because I think he's doing a fantastic job.
But I will say, the lived experiences of people who experience that sort of anti-Semitism regularly are going to feel the weight of it, no matter what sort of details around language are expressed in these situations, because there's just a more hardcore contingent who can't make the beautiful distinctions that he makes.
So to speak to your point, Julian, about how Mamdani faces the slogan, he pretty much stays factual, like saying that it has many meanings is true.
The political usages date back to Iraq in 1952.
Pointing out that the term is used by the Holocaust Museum is objectively true, saying that different activists mean different things by it is true.
But his focus on, if I police language, I get into Trump territory is also true.
And then he winds up returning the issue to the material protection of Jewish people.
I think the thing that really sort of underlies this for me, just to get psychoanalytic for a moment, is that I see an inverse proportional relationship between the intensity of trying to search deep within Mamdani's heart and brain and body for a shred of anti-Semitic sentiment or behavior.
And one, the need to jam the airwaves so that it's harder for people to hear what the fuck he's actually saying.
And secondly, the need to ignore live streamed images of people ripped to shreds or starving people gunned down in line for food aid, because the more you can hem and haw about what exactly everybody means about this word or that word, you know, the more you can bypass the reality of what's actually happening and what people are fighting about.
And just to make things even more complicated, I want to add one thing about Brad Lander.
He isn't just New York City's highest ranking Jewish public official.
He's gotten to that position while being an anti-Zionist, which he doesn't wear on his sleeve for very good reasons, the least of which is like, what does it have to do with being controller or mayor?
But if you check this out from a 2011 interview at the Briss of his son, he and his non-Jewish wife, her name is Meg Barnett.
She was a former executive at Planned Parenthood.
They gave this speech saying, quote, we are thrilled to pronounce you a Jew without the right of return.
Your name contains our deep hope that you will explore and celebrate your Jewish identity without confusing it with nationalism.
They also declared, we pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza will be history.
Well, that's 2011.
I think the kid is like 14 years old now.
He's definitely reading it by this point, and that hasn't happened, so their prayer didn't come true.
But I think it's remarkable to watch somebody like spiritualize and ritualize this vision of, you know, Jewishness, but also post-colonial justice.
Milza tough.
Mamdani started his campaign with nothing, but I just want to underline that he didn't come out of nowhere.
Like he came into this with huge intellectual and cultural resources at his back, specifically geared towards navigating this swamp of Islamophobia and projection that's only going to intensify.
So I think it's worth talking just about some of his birth details.
His mom is Mira Nair and her films and documentaries, so Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala, Perez family, I have to watch them all again at this point.
Dating back to the 90s, I remember when a Mirana film would come out, like we would all go to the rep theater or to the Indie Theater, and it was just an event.
And all of the films are about the wounds of dislocation, the celebration of complex diaspora identities and the resilience of marginalized people wherever they search for and make themselves a home.
So when his team then films this final campaign march down the length of Manhattan from Dykeman Park to the Staten Island Ferry, and he's like hugging everyone on the way and he's eating like four chicken biryanis and it looks like a reunion party of her various casts and crew people.
And that masala vibe that he brings to things is core.
I think it's how they got to brand the graphics of the campaign on blending Bollywood stuff with Metro card fonts and colors.
It was incredible posters.
His middle name is Kwame, as in Kwame Nakrumah, the Ghanian revolutionary and Gold Coast politician who was prime minister when they gained independence from the British Empire.
So his dad, Mahmoud Mandani, is a leading scholar of post-colonialism at Columbia, Go Figure, where he led teachings during the campus protests.
And that's one of the things that I find extraordinary about the short time span between campus protests and this campaign is that there's been this full turnaround on like who has power, who has the spotlight and the mic.
And one of his most popular works is called Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror, funny enough.
And it focuses on the post-9-11 social construction of good Muslims who are rational and westernized and the bad ones who are too religious or too revolutionary in their post-colonial contexts or both.
And Zoran himself cites his experience of being Muslim post-9-11 regularly to describe the impacts of stereotypes and bigotry.
And now we're going to watch him walk the line of his dad's question through every mainstream media mill on the right or the center where he tries to say, you know, or answer the questions, the implicit questions.
Is he a good Muslim?
Is he a bad Muslim?
His dad's main target is this whole discourse, what he calls the culture talk that attributes like terrorism or like antisocial behavior to inherent or essential cultural traits that are imagined to be homogeneous while downplaying political encounters and grievances.
Yeah, it's really good to call that disgusting shit out.
I also wanted to say here that he comes by his name called name checking of Nelson Mandela, honestly, because his family actually lived in Cape Town, I think, for six years or something while his dad was teaching at that university.
The dedication in that book names Zoran's schoolmates as this is dedicated to you.
And there's like eight names and some of them are in Cape Town and some of them are in Delhi and some of them are Somewhere else, somewhere in New York.
I'm really fascinated by this background.
I'm going to look into it more deeply for a brief bonus combo, like I do, because I think the general hypothesis that comes to my mind is that part of winning in the culture war is not backing away from cultural studies themes, but actually maybe leaning into them with your whole chest, especially when they are appealing, especially if they involve really good movies.
These are not incomprehensible or necessarily unpopular positions.
And also, I don't think when they're framed well, we don't have unpopular or incomprehensible positions in Mamdani's campaign.
So here's a little list of things that are rigorously anti-fascist and question the basic sort of capitalist logic of his own city while he faces down bullying, misinformation, conspiracism, and defies the concerns of Democratic strategists who focus on losing centrist votes or not being able to win back voters that they lost to Trump.
And we all know we don't know how far or how well his strategies will work in other places, but he's certainly shown that a few things are possible.
Namely, willing to be on the record as a buy-the-book Marxist.
There's this tweet from 2020 in response to a tweet from the Democratic Party itself, where they're saying the Biden-Harris administration is committed to rebuilding an economy that welcomes everyone as full participants.
And Zoran quote tweets it and says, well, if we want everyone to be full participants in the economy, we need worker ownership of the means of production, right?
Now, I guess, is he a state senator at that point?
I don't know.
Or a state representative at that point?
I'm not sure.
But like pretty bold statement.
But he also understands how to pitch and frame a kind of challenge to capitalism.
So we've got this clip here.
Do you like capitalism?
No, I have many critiques of capitalism.
And I think ultimately the definition for me of why I call myself a democratic socialist is the words of Dr. King decades ago.
He said, call it democracy or call it democratic socialism.
There must be a better distribution of wealth for all of God's children in this country.
And that's what I'm focused on is dignity and taking on income inequality.
And for too long, politicians have pretended that we're spectators to that crisis of affordability.
We're actually actors and we have the choice to exacerbate it like Mayor Adams has done or to respond to it and resolve it like I'm planning to do.
There are so many ways in which he's like just sort of poking the or pressing the perfect buttons, especially by pinging Martin Luther King.
I mean, who can argue with it?
Except for people who don't realize that as King grew in his political sort of views, he became more and more socialist, even Marxist.
But I mean, I always love the subtext or the little clues that he's sending to his own base.
And I think my favorite part of that quote is that he starts his answer with this really broad and kind of slow, oh, oh, my dear friend in Christ, smile.
Like, oh, you just asked this wonderful, but also incredibly simple question.
And so I just, I think that's kind of amazing.
So he's also the star of the New York Pride Parade this past weekend.
So that's okay to lean into with your full chest.
But what I wanted to really point out, and I mentioned this before, is that he relied on the organizational support from the DSA, 80,000 members worldwide.
They were largely responsible for networking 50,000 canvassing volunteers, and they claim to have knocked on over 1 million doors.
Amazing.
There are six DSA affiliate state reps in Albany who all backed him.
AOC and Rashida Talib are also affiliated.
And almost every single policy plank we heard about comes straight from the DSA.
And I think that what is crucial about understanding this is that the Democratic Party, for the most part, tries to avoid engaging with these people as much as possible.
Like they've never had a speaking slot or a caucus at the convention.
And they also work hard to co-opt or isolate anyone who comes from that zone.
So when someone like AOC gets a DSA endorsement, the central question for DSA is on whether they'll get absorbed into the democratic machine and compromise their values.
So that is how we get AOC actually losing her DSA endorsement over her support for mainstream positions on Israel, for instance.
And like I sort of flagged before, my interest here really is that from the outside, it can look like the old left-wing circular firing squad, idealists making the perfect the enemy of the good.
But if there's a problem at the heart of Gen Z or young men's political alienation from the processes that unfold around them, if they think that all of this is bullshit, that no one believes anything or keeps their word or really fights over anything, or that politics is run by polls rather than values, then maybe more open warfare for a season between the DSA and the DNC could give that crowd the sense that things can be vital, participatory.
If there's a credibility crisis that flows from the alienating politics of the donor classes and their consultants, then maybe fighting brings something else into visibility, something else to the table.
But you bring up, you know, you flag that the old left-wing circular firing squad right after you mention that AOC lost her endorsement because she said that the Hamas attacks were terrible.
And yet, if you look at her policy positions, everything she's doing, trying to do for New York City and nationally are about economic redistribution and about fairness.
That seems like a circular firing squad to me.
Well, we have to, I think we have to fact check whether or not that's why she lost the endorsement.
I don't think it was about her condemnation of Hamas.
I was thinking, I think I'm thinking the key moment that I remember was her repeating the line from the Harris campaign that we're working night and day to secure a ceasefire when, you know, nobody really believed that on the left side of the ledger.
And she was a sort of a, you know, the question is like, is this person going to use their left-wing clout to support the administration while they're doing something horrible.
Like, that is the moral question that they have to struggle with.
And I think, and the point that I want to make is: like, regardless of where the three of us fall on that, that is a real struggle that they have out in the open, right?
And it's about morality.
And, you know, it's like when the subject is genocide, what could be more important?
Well, they have it out in the open.
But as I mentioned earlier, a number of members fled because of entryism once the 2023 coalition was reformed, specifically around this topic.
And if you hear Mom Dani talk, there was a great quote.
We might even be including it.
I didn't listen to all the upcoming clips where he actually looks back at Ed Koch, the former, now deceased, dead, homosexual mayor of New York in the early 80s, who said that if you agree with me on nine out of 12 points, then vote for me.
But if you agree on all 12 of them, then you need to see a therapist.
Totally.
A psychiatrist.
And so, again, we get to the point with AOC here.
If there's one point that the party doesn't agree with her on, the other 11, I think they're on with her.
So I do think we have to pay attention moving forward to the sort of purity politics that might be waged against Momdani as he tries to build this coalition.
Yep.
I agree.
We'll have to pay attention to it, but I think it's a little bit reductive to say that it's purity politics when one of those three out of 12 issues is genocide, right?
Like it's like kind of, and we're talking about people who are talking about their family members.
They're talking about their extended communities.
AOC doesn't support genocide.
I'm not saying that, but it depends on how much of a stand or break are you going to make within the party with regard to overall policy towards Israel.
But you did say that her adoption of that phrase from the Harris campaign seemed to be supporting genocide.
No, I didn't say that.
It's not sufficient.
I didn't say that.
I said it wasn't sufficient.
They said that.
They said that.
So they were being reductive in that case, right?
Well, also, I mean, I actually, I mean, if we talk personally, I agree that I would be mortified to be in the position where I would say we are working night and day to stop this thing that is obviously happening while they're signing checks for more armaments to go over.
It's obviously not happening hard enough or well enough.
I don't believe they did as much as they could.
So yeah, it's very awkward.
And it's hard to think of a more sort of legitimately divisive issue.
We're not talking about differences about healthcare or like, you know, housing policy or how, you know, or whether we're going to adopt the abundance agenda or not.
It's like, are we going to stop funding children being torn to shreds?
It's pretty black and white.
I don't believe it's black and white, but we can get into that another time.
But specifically when the members left the DSA, they cited their overlooking of many other horrific instances around the world, which we are also implicated in for this one test.
So I'm going to stick with my purity politics line because I do think we're going to see more of that coming out in a rift.
And I hope not because I hope he becomes the next mayor because I think he could do some really good things here in New York City.
Yeah.
And that goes to sort of where we started or one of my sort of observations at the start, right, which is that is he the hero we've been waiting for or might some of his affiliations and positions end up creating a sort of undermining of the coalition that we need to defeat Trump?
And those are two very different sort of interpretations of what kind of strategy might work, right?
Yeah, so let's move from the most highly charged topic of our lifetimes to something a little more pedestrian.
Another topic that came up several times in the weeks before the primary election was Zoran's relationship to the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book, Abundance.
The book, which we covered back in April for episode 253, is extremely divisive amongst the commentariat.
So liberals find it interesting and insightful, a potential way forward in terms of policy, and leftists tend to damn the book as just being neoliberal Reaganomics dressed up in some sort of different clothing.
Yeah, so just to be clear, so based on who's juggling the term around, it's a flashpoint in debates about the direction of the party and what's most likely to be Trumpism.
And also, as we're recording this, I just want to flag that this morning Newsom has changed some of the California legislation to make building more easily, which is pissing off some environmental groups, but it also fits in with the abundance agenda and what's being laid out.
So it'll be interesting to see if this goes through and how that's going to affect the housing crisis in California.
Yeah.
And interesting from a different angle is someone like Mamdani actually finding things positive to say about that book.
So based on some seemingly appreciative public statements that he had made in recent speeches, he was asked about this on that same Pod Save America appearance I referenced before.
And I know, and based on how online you are, you know what I mean.
Are you abundance pilled?
Are you somebody who, where are you on abundance?
I think that there's a lot that that conversation has brought specifically around how hard or easy are we making it to actually tackle some of these issues.
And I think sometimes it gets simplified and caricatured, but fundamentally to me, the thing that's been most interesting is introducing a new lens of analysis around the bureaucracy.
And I think oftentimes the very things that we should care about on the left, we have allowed the right to make their own concerns.
Bureaucracy, efficiency, waste.
If you care about public goods, public service, these have to be your primary focuses because any evidence of that inefficiency is then a justification for the elimination of the public sector.
And I think similarly, if you think about the language of quality of life, it's often been understood as if it's a conservative concern.
But in fact, that's a concern at the bedrock of every working class person's life.
They want to have a good quality of life.
And these are not things in tension with our principles.
In fact, they're the fulfillment of them.
And I think abundance is really interesting in its really bringing that focus around housing particularly.
Okay, so he sees the way abundance addresses housing particularly as not being in tension with the values of his politics, but as being part of their fulfillment.
And he agrees with the assessment of the problems of bureaucracy And that it is a mistake to cede these kinds of quality of life agendas to the right.
Those comments on the podcast and also from the campaign stump led Derek Thompson to invite him onto his plain English podcast.
And in the intro to that episode, Thompson name-checked Bernie advocate Rokana and progressive Maryland governor Wes Moore as appreciating the book, despite waves of intense criticism from left-wing pundits.
He said that Mamdani had called some leftist critiques of the book oversimplified and that he invited him on to discuss where they might both agree and disagree.
So another clip here, my last one.
This question from Thompson is crucial because Mamdani's top proposal for dealing with the New York housing crisis is freezing rent on rent-stabilized units or RSUs, while abundance urges fast-tracking the building of new housing.
So Thompson asks Zoran, how do you plan to do both those things at the same time?
Beyond that, to your larger question of how do we both freeze the rent and ensure that we're building more, what I've heard from a lot of developers is one of the ways in which we are driving up costs in New York City is not even the dollar cost, but actually the time cost, which is then obviously translating into dollars.
And that time and the delay of that time is in part because of the processes by which we approach land use.
And this is also where abundance speaks to me in, you know, in thinking about this both with regards to small businesses.
And if you look at the example in Pennsylvania, where they took a, what was it, an eight-week permitting time and cut it down to just a few days.
But also in terms of housing, where we currently have a piecemeal approach where each city council member gets to determine whether or not a land use project moves forward by virtue of something known as member deference.
And what we need in order to actually build enough supply for the city that we have and to get past this staggeringly low vacancy rate is a comprehensive citywide approach, one that can fast track projects, especially those that are in line with the administration's goals.
And I say that because there are a number of projects which you won't actually find that much disagreement on.
For example, low-income housing for seniors that are still not been built many, many years later.
And ultimately, that's a failure of just how slow this process goes.
Yeah, so that's an excellent conversation.
I edited it for time, but as listeners will be able to tell, we're into this wonky territory now about policy and permitting and all of that kind of thing.
They do go into, for anyone interested in listening, a comparative discussion of places like Jersey City versus Chicago and how various kinds of permitting processes have affected rents, rents actually declining in Jersey City as a result of increasing building,
housing supply, low-income housing units costing a million dollars or more to build both in Chicago and in Los Angeles because of a whole set of bureaucratic, very well-intentioned policies being in place.
So that's, I think he has a lot of very insightful things to say about that.
Yeah.
And I think he's really smart to find as much agreement as he can with abundance movement people while also emphasizing, because this was at the top of his platform, city-built, all-union-built construction, which is not always part of the abundance movement conversation more broadly.
I think the game here is about who is going to co-opt whom.
Well, yes.
And if you see it through the lens of co-opting, absolutely.
But you might also see it through the lens of who can I partner with and make acceptable compromises with in terms of our shared goals, right?
Well, shout out to my brother-in-law, who has worked in construction for over four decades as a union member and built many of those buildings in Jersey City, where I lived in the 90s and 2000s and wish I could have bought property then, but that did not happen.
He can't give you an in.
He doesn't have any in for you.
Unfortunately, the construction workers and the private equity firms are sort of, there's a firewall between them that's right forever.
So let's look at some of the right-wing and social media responses to Mamdani's win because they've been delightful.
Focusing on one Democratic primary in one city turns out to churn out conspiratorial content much better than the actual destruction of social services that are about to be passed into law in Trump's new bill.
Let's just quickly go through a few greatest hits.
So Mamdani is setting up New York City for another 9-11 style attack, or maybe many of them.
He's definitely going to institute Sharia law.
These statements came from Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer, and Elise Stefanik, among others.
We have to ping the AI image of Lady Liberty in a burqa because that was shared by Marjorie Taylor Greene and others.
I think it's kind of hilarious because then people respond with photographs of Zoran's wife, the Syrian political artist, Ramaduaji, and then, of course, the thousands of women who campaigned for him.
And then, of course, the Sharia Pride Parade that he danced at over the weekend.
Trump called Momdani a 100% communist lunatic while the entire MAGA cohort screamed about his radical policies that we've been discussing.
And I'll add, just now, within the last hour, Trump says that he may arrest Mumdani if he does not comply with ICE.
Is that while we're recording?
Yes, yes.
Fucking hell now.
Yeah, which is pretty bold considering he hasn't won the mayorship yet.
Yeah, right.
He's still nobody.
Right.
Yeah, I'll arrest him at the food truck.
Yeah.
A few more.
The fear of defunding the police and claims of anti-Semitism is pervasive, even though, as we've shown through clips, both of those are clearly articulated by the man.
My favorite is in a TikTok video where he's talking about his stance in Palestine and he's sitting in a park eating briani while explaining it.
And there are so many comments and people like the incel account and wokeness focus on the fact that he's eating with his hands.
It's disgusting.
I'll just say I regularly eat with my hands and I also sit on the ground while we eat dinner every night because functionally and anatomically, it just makes sense.
But this sort of fear that especially white Americans have around anything that diverges from their accepted practices is really disgusting.
One commenter called him a dog because he ate with his hands, which I don't think dogs eat with their hands, but hey, I'm not looking for intelligence for MAGA.
The most dangerous to me, and all of these are dangerous and disingenuous, but the one that is calling for him to be denaturalized.
So last week, SCODIS decided on a case on birthright citizenship.
It didn't end birthright citizenship, but it has major implications for policy, such as the court ruled that federal district judges can no longer issue nationwide injunctions to block presidential executive orders.
This means that when a controversial order is challenged, it may only be blocked in a state or district where the lawsuit was filed, not across the entire country.
That is shit for anyone who hopes for progressive politics.
SCOTUS has also become the final arbiter on executive actions, taking that power away from lower courts.
So there's more to it, but there is now uncertainty and confusion around this topic baked into the process.
And if Trump was to take seriously the idea of denaturalizing Momdani, it's not an impossible outcome.
And that's terrifying because who knows what happens to New York City.
Yeah, overall, right?
Yeah, you know, in the popular front spirit, and just to return to Klein for a moment, here's where I want to compliment him at least once in my life.
And this is on his discussion with Chris Hayes on his media chops.
Klein winds up, I think, de-emphasizing some of the harder political implications of his win, but I do agree that the media campaign offered something different.
Klein called it upbeat.
He said it was post-Twitter and post-like text-based acrimony.
And I think that's right.
I also think it's important to tag the root of that positivity and the kind of Bollywood, Lollywood joy that I think is irresistible to so many folks, no matter where they're from.
But there's also something concrete there that I want to ping, which is related to a big part of our beat, which focuses on the contagion of emotion in the political realm, what it means, how it gets directed, how it pays off for people or it drives them to distraction.
So, you know, on Sunday, Mom Donnie's at the Pride Parade.
I'm watching him dance.
And it reminds me that the last time that anyone under the Democratic Party umbrella attempted to mobilize joy was during the Harris campaign.
And it was in the talking points and the campaign walk-up music.
It was in the guests.
It was in the graphic design.
And it drew a lot of people in yearning for relief from the Trumpification of the country.
But it also alienated this smaller but growing and younger wing of the party that seeks joy in fighting for trans rights or in solidarity against state violence.
And at the convention, speaker after speaker were speaking about a return to joy, but then party officials denied a time slot, for example, to Rua Roman, who is the Palestinian state legislator from Georgia.
But then this month, she travels to New York City and she campaigns for Mamdani because there's this huge overlap between his campaign, the DSA, and Uncommitted.
And my point is, like, I don't think the emotion for certain groups can be forced without backing it up with something solid, social policy, you know, a pledge to fight to end state violence.
And the thing is that fascists are doing this all the time.
They force and manipulate emotions.
And when they do it, they back it up with concrete policy.
They say, we're going to abuse or kill these scapegoats, and then you're going to feel better about yourself.
So I just see a difference there.
If you want to resist that and push the emotional contagion the other way, you have to have some sort of substance.
You have to have some sort of vision.
And I think you have to show that you aren't playing with people's hearts and their pain.
I think you have to come through on it.
Also, I mean, at this point, Mamdani has to come through on it without getting arrested by the fascists.
