Back in June, we published an episode about the "Speaking with American Men" (SAM) project, a $20 million initiative designed by political consultants to understand and win back young men (18-29) who increasingly voted for Donald Trump. We talked about this cringey, inauthentic approach to compete over the influence of manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Huberman, who exploit a perceived "meaning crisis" with pseudo-intellectual and often reactionary messages.
Instead of what? We said that the better route would be to focus on material concerns so that the rage of young men isn’t ceded to right-wing movements. Big-money consultant-led efforts to micromanage online interactions will not spawn-in the authentic cultural engagement that right-wing influencers naturally achieve.
Well here we are now in the fall, and we’ve got a bunch of guys stepping into this contested space from different angles. Zohran Mamdani and Graham Platner present very differently as masculine role models, but share the same economic populism, but also a deep challenge in the long shadow of patriarchy: how do men become trustworthy?
Show Notes
Brief: Nair, Mamdani, and Culture against the Culture War (Pt 1) — Conspirituality
Matthew's Review of Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway
A Political Litmus Test: Can You Hang With the Boys?
Zohran Mamdani Is New York’s First Millennial Mayor. You Can Tell by His Suit.
A Political Misdiagnosis—NYT on How Dems lost Black and Hispanic Voters
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Episode 283.
Guys.
Actually, how should I say that, guys?
Is it guys?
Guys.
Is that right?
I think the second one.
All right.
Okay, that's fine.
Back in June, we published an episode called Dems Ask, What is a Man?
And this was about the Speaking with American Men project, a $20 million initiative designed by political consultants to understand and win back young men aged 18 to 29 who increasingly voted for Donald Trump.
We talked about this cringy, inauthentic approach to compete over the influence of Manosphere figures like Jordan Peterson and Andre Huberman, who exploit a perceived meaning crisis with pseudo-intellectual and often reactionary messages.
Instead of what?
We said that the better route would be to focus on material concerns so that the rage of young men isn't seeded to right-wing movements.
Big money consultant-led efforts to micromanage online interactions aren't going to spawn in the authentic cultural engagement that right-wing influencers naturally achieve.
Well, here we are now in the fall, and we've got a bunch of guys stepping into this contested space from different angles.
Zorhan Mamdani and Graham Plattner present very differently as masculine role models, but share the same economic populism and also the same deep challenge in the long shadow of patriarchy.
How do men become trustworthy?
The big political media story in the aftermath of Kamala Harris's crushing 2024 defeat centered on men, especially young men.
How did the Democratic Party lose so much support among men and how do they win it back?
With an overall gender gap having grown such that 13% more women than men voted for Harris and Walls, among Gen Z, it was even worse news for Dems.
According to Tufts Circle research, young women favored Harris by 17 points, while young men went for Trump by 14 points.
That's a 31% split.
Many commentators attribute this to the effects of social media, especially the Manosphere and the influence of brogue podcasters.
They point to data saying that men feel increasingly lonely and aggrieved with few career and relationship prospects.
This makes them sitting ducks, so the story goes, for online propaganda that is anti-feminist, anti-woke, and encourages embracing hyper-masculine workout and self-optimization culture that leans toward both pseudoscience beliefs and reactionary politics.
Within that sphere, comedians, MMA fighters, and contrarian influencers churn out hours of content every week, just asking questions in uneducated ways about UFOs, recycled conspiracy theories, toxic feminism, vaccines, race and IQ, and if Hitler was really the bad guy after all.
At the same time, they're cutting promos for workout supplements, BS wellness products, or online courses and books on self-mastery and stoicism, leading many then to cry out from the Democratic sphere, but where?
Oh, where is the Joe Rogan of the left?
Yeah, and I just want to flag up top that this workflow from, you know, data says that men feel increasingly lonely and aggrieved with few career and relationship prospects, which is undoubtedly out there, to where is the Joe Rogan of the left, kind of, it seems useless to me if the desire is to head off fascism.
I mean, the framework is who can we get to capture, represent, and motivate all this grievance.
And I mean, that's kind of thinking like a fascist thing as opposed to like, how do we rectify these grievances?
Yeah, it's such a tricky one because right-wingers and Christian nationalists do have ideas.
They do have some solutions for these grievances, whether, you know, perceived or real.
And all those answers are terrible.
I'll add that heading off fascism is certainly important, especially to us and a portion of the population.
But it's not like that's something broadly discussed in these spaces.
So the framework is a lot larger than that.
Well, but what spaces are we talking about?
Because, I mean, generally we have Rachel Maddow and Heather Cox Richardson talking about fascism every day to millions.
Like what's the broader framework that you're talking about when we're talking about the Joe Rogan of the left?
Well, I never wanted a Joe Rogan of the left.
I think that's not even a good construction personally.
But there's a great piece of reporting in the New York Times from the 10th on Zoran Mandani was going to go on Rogan, but scheduling conflicts happen.
But in that piece, Mamdani was hung out with Hassan Piker one day, and Piker said something that they quoted that I thought was instructive, that Zoran's just a dude.
It's good to just be a dude sometimes.
So you have Maddox and Richardson who are amazing and they're doing that work to their audience, but there's an entire other audience out there.
And I think, you know, in retrospect, we're looking at Rogan here in 2025.
And of course, we all have a lot of criticisms.
But as someone who formerly listened, the parasocial relationships that are developed in those spaces for men, where you don't necessarily have an objective, you just go into a conversation and you're just shooting the shit with someone.
That is largely appealing to a population.
So to me, a Joe Rogan of the left is going to be someone who isn't inherently misogynistic and doesn't get swayed by misinformation in the way that he does, but someone who still has left of center values and has conversations with people without the necessity of always having one framework to talk about, but is actually like Rogan used to be, which is very inviting.
And hey, just come in and let's have a conversation.
I think we undervalue how that targets a certain population that we're discussing today.
Yeah, there's a lot there.
I mean, I think, Matthew, I understand the cynicism about a Democratic Party initiative like this.
I think I take just a slightly less cynical view.
Like understanding and listening to the grievances can be a way to figure out how to help and how to try to address those things and thereby win back support.
Yeah, I guess that really depends on the sort of connection between the consultancy program and the policymakers, right?
And whether they're going to talk to each other at all.
Like is Sam going to come back to Chuck Schumer and say, oh, this is what you should do?
Because like, I would love to hear them talk to speak to American men about feelings unfolding on the shutdown or the leadership not endorsing Mamdani and, you know, plans for abundance economics versus, you know, whatever else is on the table.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I think that is the idea that they were trying to sell.
I don't know where they're at with it now, right?
That they would therefore have some input on policy platform.
So this Sam project is spearheaded, as you mentioned, Matthew, by a longtime pro-choice activist and president of Naral, Elise Hoag, alongside public opinion researcher and political advisor John DeLaVolpe and former Democrat Texas Representative Colin Allred and Sam,
or speaking to American men's initial focus groups, found that men aged 18 to 29 felt especially isolated and socially disconnected due to COVID and that they were beset by economic anxiety in a time when owning a home and saving for kids' future college education, for example, just seems out of reach.
And that this was affecting their self-image in terms of being able to live up to what it means to be a man.
These young men said they felt ashamed and confused about conflicting cultural messages on masculinity.
Democrats, said one participant, endorse sensitive and empathic, fluid masculinity, while Republicans stand for strong traditional masculinity.
Democrats were described as overly scripted and cautious.
And this may go too to the idea of what would a Joe Rogan of the left be, right?
It's not going to be someone who is overtly preaching a political message that comes across for some reason as overly scripted, cautious, perhaps preachy, while Republicans were confident and unafraid to offend.
Figures like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump himself were seen to be both loved and hated, but always authentic and truthful.
Just a note, I'm not endorsing any of these perceptions myself.
Always truthful about their unapologetic beliefs.
Further, only 27% of those they talked to had favorable opinions of the Democratic Party.
And so the takeaway, according to these consultants, was that Democrats should focus their advertising into more non-traditional digital areas like video games and avoid a moralizing tone, more meeting men where they're at and acknowledging their struggles instead.
It's so tricky.
I mean, there's something about the reporting around authenticity that needs some scrutiny, I think, because within this core of the meme world, at least, that helped drive Trump to power through shitposting and QAnon.
You know, so Dale Barron's book on that is the best that we have.
No one believed that Trump was authentic.
Like a lot of the Chans saw him as this hilarious loser, but useful tool who would smash the normie world and make fools out of Facebook boomers while counteracting or counter-attacking feminists.
They didn't ignore the irony of saying Trump would drain the swamp.
They actually lived for it.
And then, you know, as for Tate, I've always seen a divide between those who think he's authentic and those who like literally laugh out loud at the fact that he's a cartoon who says all the hateful things out loud on their behalf.
And then part of the Democratic Party's answer is to enter the video game space, but like with what?
Like this is not a space about authenticity.
It is anonymous.
It's transgressive.
It's irony pilled.
It runs on cosplay.
It's got a bazillion different elements to it.
Like you can't micromanage it.
I don't think that negates authenticity.
I mean, a good amount of Trump and Tate supporters believe those men are being authentic.
One of the most appealing qualities of either men to their audiences is that they are just themselves all the time.
And I don't think any of us has the ability to engage with the sort of metacognition of online posters and their true beliefs because anonymity obscures that from analysis.
Yeah, I think it's difficult to, I mean, I imagine we're misunderstanding each other a little bit here.
I think this is difficult because we're getting at the difference between being a true self or being authentic and having absolutely no shame about being socially transgressive.
Like I don't see the purely transgressive as authentic.
And I also see that authenticity itself is something that has to be performed.
And, you know, who true selves are subjective.
So I can't really sort of get in under the cover there.
What I do spend time in Tate world on TikTok, I can tell you that there's a ton of comments that acknowledge that Tate is a circus clown in their eyes, albeit the clown who is doing their work.
It's like he's their clown doing their work of mockery and humiliation.
I think it's really, it's really difficult.
Well, I mean, I don't think we're misunderstanding in a sense that because you kind of nailed it when you said you don't see the purely transgressive as authentic, that doesn't mean that other people don't, right?
Because there are just fucking assholes out there.
There are a lot of guys who that is the shit.
That is what they want to do and that's what they get off on.
So that's where the sort of boundaries are stretched in terms of a definition here, because authenticity doesn't have to have a moral component to it.
And for a lot of men who fall into these spaces, that is authentic to them.
In the pre-Trump era, I can't tell you how many times I ran into just like everyday white dudes who in relation to some kind of transgressive speech would say, oh, well, I like that guy because he says what everyone else is thinking.
And we're not supposed to say it because we're trying to be politically correct, right?
I think it's that definition of authenticity as opposed to something that we would get into around, you know, like psychology, self-actualization, philosophical sort of interrogation.
Yeah, I think that's the problem.
I can't really shake the notion of we're talking about, if we say authenticity, we're talking about people recognizing a wholeness in a person, right?
Because what we're actually talking about is the willingness to be as reactive as possible, right?
In the dialectic of social media.
Like, I'm not going to have any shame about saying whatever the fuck I want, and I'm not going to be held accountable for it.
And that is going to feel like it's true and rich and muscular and vital.
And so that's who I am.
And I'm like, yeah, that's not going to work.
But that's also, there are people, there are people like that in real life, though.
And that's what I'm saying.
I mean, I am a gym rat my whole life and I've worked in gyms.
Like that culture exists in real life.
Like it is there in the locker, the whole locker room boys speech, that shit is real.
And that is how guys act in the world itself.
And also being someone with a lot of close female friends who I've heard dating horror stories, that shit is just real.
So that's where I kind of fall in the fact that I'm going to take them at their word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, going back to the message board space, I mean, I don't know that this Sam project is necessarily talking so much to guys who are, you know, on 4chan or what have you, because that's a little bit of a niche subset.
And those trolls really delighted in the absurd power of memeing Trump into success, as Dale Baran describes so beautifully, and it came from something awful.
But I think the broader electorate who shifted from Obama to Trump do seem to have this perception that Democratic candidates are fake and scripted, which we might actually say, well, really, they're professional and measured and cautious in how they speak, which is a good thing, right?
While Republican candidates are supposedly warts and all honest.
So yeah, perhaps they mistake narcissism and vitriol for authenticity.
There's also the problem, though, that along with perceived class elitism, Democrats have this issue that a lot of the positions that they hold, especially on immigration and crime and LGBTQ issues that I think we've always assumed would bring along sort of all minority groups who feel marginalized as one, have actually ended up to the left of some of those minority groups that Democrats want to champion.
So in 2024, even though Harris still won majorities amongst young male black and Latino voters, Trump continued to make gains within those demographics.
And overall, he won the majority of both non-college educated and college educated Gen Z voters in 2024, which I think a lot of people were not expecting.
Between these shifting loyalties and attempts to gerrymander and suppress votes in more traditionally Democratic areas with tactics like new voter ID laws, it's looking increasingly difficult for Democrats to win the kinds of majorities in the House and Senate that enable enacting any kind of legislative power.
Some analysts point to the perception that the party has come to be perceived as serving only the coastal elites and hyper-progressive niche activist agendas that can end up seeming to disparage a majority of working class American males, whatever their race.
So Hillary Clinton's basket of deplorables, infamous gaffe, still haunts the Dem psyche.
And Steve Bannon's much touted ability to flip two-time Rust Belt Obama voters toward Trump in 2016 may have been the harbinger of what has since come to pass.
So can Democrats work to win back the predominantly white middle American working class via emphasizing an economic populist platform?
Can that kind of populism start to address the economic anxieties of young men who say they feel left behind?
Who will the leaders be of this new kind of democratic politics?
This is what we're talking about today.
Perhaps there are some hints in Zorhan Mamdani's recent victory in New York with its useful, excuse me, its youthful social media savvy messaging, emphasis on affordability, and principled brave commitment to authentic truth-telling in the face of bigoted smears.
Now, he couldn't bench press the bare minimum when he good-naturedly gave it a try on camera, but boy, did he hand Cuomo and Sliwa their asses when they came at him on the debate stage.
Perhaps Graham Plattner's controversy-ridden 2026 Senate campaign in Maine is instructive as we watch him too take economic populist positions as an ordinary white guy military vet.
But ironically, he has a military background in the kinds of operations that Mamdani's prominent post-colonial academic father may have written about in his scathing analysis of American people.
Oh, he did.
He did.
Well, let me jump in as the gym wrap because by bare minimum, you're referring to two plates, which is 135 pounds, which is considered a basic warm-up for lifting.
And I always notice a lot of dudes will leave that amount on the bar instead of racking the weights because in their world, they can't perceive that any man couldn't put that up.
This type of thinking dominates the fitness world for a certain population, which is what I was talking about a moment ago with the certain perception that exists with certain young and older men.
And it brings up a real challenge when it comes to discussions around health and fitness because humans generally need some level of fitness.
I fully agree that people need to take care of their bodies, but it's not necessarily the arbitrary amount or the specific markers that are set by Fitbros who are just being douchebags when they're being too lazy or proud to clean up after themselves.
You know, I can't do 135 pounds because I have cartilage damage in my right shoulder from baseball pitching through my teens.
I threw really hard.
So that action, like even at low weights, just makes a rice crispy sound that's totally gross.
I just can't stand it.
Yeah.
So we have to account for, you know, people dealing with all sorts of different realities in the gym as well as in the outside world.
You know, I wonder about this Graham Plattner campaign, to come back to that.
It struggled under a different kind of weight, that of resurfaced online faux pas and that big old skull and bones tattoo he got on his chest while serving in Croatia.
That turns out to be Nazi affiliated.
But as all of that was going down, I noticed progressive commentators that I like, like Emma Viegland and Crystal Ball, wondering out loud if wanting more populist everyman candidates means we probably are going to have to be more collectively forgiving of these kinds of imperfect human story arcs.
And then about that Mamdani victory, it coincided with a big swing among young male voters toward him, as well as other Democratic candidates across several states.
He won men by a stunning 40% in New York City, while Abigail Spanberger won them by 14% and Mike Sherrill by 10% in their governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively.
This will no doubt be studied and talked about quite a bit in the coming months as Dems try to reverse engineer some kind of midterm joy in the face of fascist panic.
Finally, the ongoing conversation about what is going on with young men, like are they being red-pilled into MAGA or blackpilled into nihilism, an ironic white supremacy or even murderous terrorism?
Are they suffering through a loneliness epidemic that's going to require a lot of empathy?
Are they failing at school and college because girls are being favored?
Are they feeling ashamed both of their emotional needs and the very fact of being male at all?
Well, now perhaps they have a new figurehead who can analyze all of this and help us help men.
Yeah, with extensive field work, hundreds of interviews of men in various economic situations from various cultures.
No, actually, I'm talking about our episode and the two case studies of Plattner and Mamdani we're looking at is rolling out against the backdrop of Scott Galloway's new book.
It's called Notes on Being a Man and his coordinated media blitz.
I'll keep this short because I've already spent a huge amount of time reviewing this book.
I'll link to a full review I did in the show notes.
So Mamdani and Plattner are men and they are embodying or presenting ways or performing ways of being men in the world that focus on caregiving and equality.
Now, neither of them talk about being men, although Plattner did have to go into describing male military culture in his explanation of his Reddit history, because they don't need to.
They're doing stuff.
But Galloway, who is a marketing prof worth $100 million who podcasts for most of his days, has to talk about it because talking is his product.
And so what does he say?
His main thesis, I'll just give it straight up and then I'll give one example of his media technique.
And if you have any thoughts or questions on either, I can fill some stuff in briefly.
Okay, so his thesis is boys and men are suffering because they have forgotten their essential roles and responsibilities.
To be a man, Galloway argues, you must protect, provide, and procreate.
Ah, those his three Ps.
This is alarmingly adjacent to the variety of political and cultural war stances on masculinity that we already know trend toward reactionary anti-feminism, right?
Men need to reclaim their traditional gender roles.
Yeah, so the title is Notes on Being a Man, and there are 44 notes or aphorisms that are sprinkled as call-outs throughout the book.
And you might be shocked to learn that the first one implicitly rejects feminist analysis by saying toxic masculinity is an oxymoron.
But I think the funny thing is, and this has to do with this rollout and, you know, who's going to like this book, the advanced reading copy shipped with a letter from the Simon Aschuster editor, Stephanie Frerek, where she paraphrases bell hooks in support of this book.
And my take on this is that mainstream platforms, you know, excited about this kind of liberal Jordan Peterson are going to lean into making Galloway sound like he is more of a feminist than he is.
But throughout the book, he really shows he doesn't read feminism or really care much about it.
So then about his technique.
The book is big on vibes because it's kind of thin on policy.
So he proposes concrete things like a $25 an hour minimum wage, redshirting boys to hold them back a year in primary school, government investment in housing, and regulating social media.
Not a lot.
The balance is kind of like, this is how you excel at capitalism, young man.
However, in his media blitz, he has incorporated into his talking points statements like, something that would improve the prospects of young men's lives is universal childcare.
So when I heard him first do this on The View or MSNBC or wherever it was, I was like, wait a minute, I went back to the text to see if he mentions this.
It's a 300-page book about being a man and the phrase child care doesn't appear.
So why is he talking about something that is not in his book?
As if it was in the same week that Mamdani won in part on that very platform promise.
I mean, Galloway, I think I can say is not a leader, but he is a talker.
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As you flag, Matthew, the two people we're talking about, they don't really give notes on being a man.
I mean, Zora Mamdani doesn't at all.
Platinum doesn't really talk about it.
I'm not as familiar with him, but since his star rose, the term was quickly affixed to him due to his military background, his deep voice, his confrontational nature.
I mean, Zoron is confrontational as well, but he's brought elements of play and joy into his campaign the entire time, which really highlights angles of being a man we don't normally associate with the term masculinity.
So I'm going to think about this big picture for a moment.
I talk often with my wife and my close female friends about a gulf that's usually not discussed when men talk about masculinity.
It's the difference between what women are attracted to and what men think women are attracted to.
Now, of course, women like men have different desires and tastes, so no single quality is going to appeal to everyone.
But from experience, my friendships and relationships have taught me that men often think they're doing things that are attractive to women, and really they're just making themselves more attractive to other men, which nothing wrong with that, but I do think it's mentally confusing because the intended audience isn't actually reached.
And that makes for a lot of strife and leads to a lot of miscommunication, failed expectations, and at the worst end of this, misogyny.
Obviously, I'm also talking about straight men in this equation for this discussion.
So of all the conversations I've had with people close to me, they find Zorond wildly attractive.
They also find him more of a man than most any other political figure that they've seen, except perhaps Barack Obama is the other one that comes to mind.
And it has nothing to do with his looks or his ability to lift a lot of weight, which he humorously says he can't do, and we can see that.
That tends to be men trying to appeal to men.
And just to be clear, when I say looks, I don't mean style because that's something that is attractive to many.
I mean, the New York Times wrote a pretty good article on why Zoron's clothing choices made such an impact.
And I'll include that in the show notes.
Okay, so again, this is my analysis from conversations and things I pick up on social media.
First off, Zoron is funny.
And sometimes we underestimate how important that is.
It was part of Obama's charms as well.
And humor is very political.
Back in 1999, I asked George Carlin why, as someone who talks so much about politics, he chose to be a comedian.
And he told me it's because if you make someone laugh, they're more likely to listen to what you have to say.
They let their guard down because you made them feel good.
And once you're in, you can change their minds.
But if you come at them and start yelling at them right off the bat, you're only going to turn them away from whatever you want to say.
And even if you say things they might agree with, you've already lost them.
Yeah, it's funny, actually, as you're talking about what women find attractive in generalized terms.
It makes me think of how often I've heard women say when they're asked that question, oh, humor, someone who's funny, right?
Because there's something we see in a person who's comfortable with that spontaneity of humor.
And with Mamdani, he's funny, but I think that's also part of a relational quality that he simply exudes.
He's quick to smile.
He smiles with his eyes.
He smiles with his whole face.
His default setting is to tap into the kinds of warmth and empathy that are necessary for spontaneous humor.
He even kind of gives a little bit of that when he's listening to someone say something he finds dishonest or ridiculous.
And he's got that quick, observant intelligence.
Obama had that.
Hillary, not really.
Trump only appears to laugh in the public eye as an expression of cruelty, right?
Well, I think that's the key is we're talking about a particular type of humor that's not ironic, except when he's punching up at Cuomo or his backers.
He's kind of puckish in relation to his networks of uncles and aunties.
So the laughs feel wholesome.
His rapper name was Mr. Cardamom, and he rapped about how cool grandmothers are.
So cardamom is like a foundational Indian spice for like sweet and savory dishes.
It's also the spice of hospitality and fresh breath.
So I don't know.
The humor is like Bollywood crossed with musical theater.
It's like wholesome.
You like to say punching up, punching down.
I think in this case, Zoran was punching down at Cuomo given how bad Cuomo was at social media.
He was just laying it on it.
That's true.
So Zoran's funny and he uses social media extremely well.
Sure, you want a politician who knows about policy, but guess what?
He got his policies across in extremely inventive ways without losing sight that he was also entertaining people.
I mean, I just said it a moment ago, but in reality, when someone asked Cuomo what he regretted most about his campaign, he said, I should have been better at social media.
But you can't do social media right if you're a stiff, unfunny person.
I mean, you might be able to leverage that in different ways, but when you're up against someone who's mastered the craft, and we should note Zoran had a team, not a single person filming like Cuomo often did.
I mean, Cuomo was just lost from the very beginning of this.
So speaking of, Zoron expressed honest humility.
And I think that's another very strong masculine quality.
There's a great video of him speaking in Spanish.
And then halfway through, you see a fuck up.
And then you see another.
And then it kind of, you know, breaks through the fourth wall there.
And then assembly woman Amanda Septimo, who worked as his Spanish coach, is there going over lines with him, teaching him the words.
You see her kind of laugh and be like, this word isn't new to you.
You've done it before.
And then he replies, they're all new words.
So instead of the usual pandering to a crowd you often get from politicians, you actually see a man who's struggling to learn something new, which we can all relate to, whether we want to admit it or not.
And I think there's something key in that exchange, too, that is probably super attractive and new in American politics, which is you have a 34-year-old man who is taking criticism from a slightly older, it appears, woman, and he's laughing and he's not getting defensive and he's grateful for her help and he's he's not impatient.
Like, I mean, even such something so small as that, his entire transitional team, I think, is older women.
And it's like, how is he actually positioning himself here?
He is not putting himself into some kind of commanding patriarchal alpha position.
And with regard to language, he also cut campaign videos in Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali.
Here in Toronto, if you phone City Hall with a question or a problem, you can access phone services in 180 languages.
And so I looked it up.
And in New York City, there's something similar, but it's limited to 10.
But I do think that Mamdani is going to be able to just stand in for that entire system in person if Trump cuts the phone lines.
I still think about the Arabic food I had in Toronto.
I miss that place.
I don't remember the name.
I'll have to look it up.
It's fantastic.
Yeah.
Okay.
So all that leads to my last point, because Zoron doesn't pretend to know things that he does not.
He was on this Instagram feed.
It's probably on TikTok too, called Trackstar.
And this is where the host has you try to guess songs.
And sometimes it's people on the street, more recently as it's gained popularity at celebrities.
And Zoron went on there and he nailed all the New York City hip hop, like and some deep cuts there too.
But he failed at what should have been the easiest one, which is Billy Joel.
He had no idea who it was, Mr. New York.
And he laughed his ass off when the host told him.
But Billy Joel isn't who Zoran is.
I mean, us Gen Xers will know him in a heartbeat, but that's who we are.
And Zoron didn't pretend to be anything else.
It's kind of like during one of the debates when they were asking about fucking statues and Cuomo and Sliwa were pontificating.
And Zoron's like, I don't think about statues.
I'm thinking about affordability.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That moment is really gold on that show.
I mean, on the show, they're testing your knowledge, right?
So typically the person has some area where they maybe feel fairly confident or whatever.
And so, yeah, he nails all those deep hip-hop cuts.
And then I think the host thought he was kind of teeing it up for him by playing New York State of Mind, right?
And Mamdani is secure enough not to shut down or fake it.
It's like, I don't know who that is.
And so, of course, we laugh along with him.
And then he used that later on in extra social media to laugh at himself more, which is just brilliant.
So perhaps the most masculine trait to me and the people I've talked to is that he's unapologetically himself.
Authenticity is sort of a theme here today.
He just seems comfortable in his skin.
When the right came at him for eating the rice with his hands, he posted more photos of himself eating rice with his hands.
And I want to also note that people really got on that, but over half the world's population eats fucking rice with their hands.
So get out of your fucking bubble.
I also noticed that late in his campaign, he was using his middle name, Kwame, more often.
Now, think about how the right weaponized Hussein, Barack Obama's middle name, which he never really addressed, at least not that I'm aware of.
They tried the same shit with Zoran.
And instead of ignoring it, he's like, yeah, that's my fucking name.
I'll use it.
And so he said it more.
And that had the effect of taking the power away from them.
Yeah.
And I wonder if anybody dug into Kwame being actually Kwame Nagurum of the revolutionary in what, Ghana?
I don't know.
I've only seen Zoro and say it.
I don't know if he's.
That's who he's named for, according to his parents.
Yeah.
So you have humor, humility, being comfortable with himself, even his perceived shortcomings.
These are not traits you're going to hear about in the bro podcast space.
So to get back to your question earlier, Matthew, about the Joe Rogan of the left, I would say all these qualities would help to create that sort of environment where they don't take themselves so seriously.
And it's certainly not the muscular John Wayne figure traditional Americans have applied to the term masculinity for generations.
And I think that's a good thing because that figure is so often an act.
Authenticity is so much more attractive to a lot of people, as we saw with the vote total in New York this year.
And I'd say that those qualities are at least as important and even more so in certain cases as all of the leadership and strength traits that are normally applied to the term.
I think all of that is right, Derek.
I want to add two things about Mamdani.
For me, his deconstruction of the American masculine comes from the fact that he uses humor, humility, and honest self-awareness, as you're talking about, but to speak for caregiving rather than abstract defensive values.
Like he's not out there celebrating the nation, pumping up the cops, bragging about how he'll make a show of visiting Israel as soon as he's elected.
His attention is how on how things actually work.
One of Cuomo's worst moments, I think, was his soundless commercial of him pretending to fix a guy's car.
Mamdani didn't do a car ad, but if he had done a car ad, it would have been where he was sharing chai with like a Bangladeshi mechanic who fixes cars 14 hours a day, not pretending to fix a car.
Yeah, and then Cuomo has that moment with that like hail fellow, well-met, how's it going, bro, with the black guy where he tries to like dap him up with the, with the multiple handshakes, right?
At every opportunity, I think this is key.
Mamdani is elevating labor and laborers who are often unseen.
And this is from the halal truck guys who tell him why chicken and rice is $10 instead of $7 to, I don't know if you saw these street desk history lessons that he would give on old New York labor leaders or heroes of trans politics, people whose shoulders he's standing on.
Like he's never, he's always citing his sources, right?
And then in his acceptance speech, he's quoting Eugene Debs and Jawahal Nehru, and his attention is to the unseen citizen is a central theme.
So he says, fingers bruised from lifting boxes on the warehouse floor, palms calloused from delivery by candlebars, knuckles scarred with kitchen burns.
These are not hands that have been allowed to hold power.
And yet over the past 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.
And then he names the unseen people.
Quote, thank you to those who often are forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own.
I speak of Yemeni bodego owners and Mexican abuelas, Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties.
Yes, aunties.
So to me, deconstructing masculinity begins with doing what American elite men, especially if they're hyper-capitalist, assiduously avoid doing, which is acknowledge that there is unseen labor that keeps all of this running because you can't talk too much about the work of the abuela or the Uzbek nurse or the Ethiopian auntie without provoking this question, like, how much are we paying them?
And what would we do without them?
Yeah, it's the lines from the speech that you chose, Matthew, they're so moving and humane and I think historic in their inclusivity.
It really speaks to a city filled with immigrants and people of color.
And I think other earlier Democratic politicians have spoken to some extent in this way about workers and wages, about minorities and immigrants, maybe not as poetically.
But in terms of our main topic today, you know, many analysts, as I mentioned, point back to Hillary's infamous Basket of Deplorables moment on stage and then Obama's, they cling to their guns and their babies in a private comment that got leaked as emblematic of how Democrats have lost the white, especially male working class, which is what they have to win back in the heartland.
So I'm just aware here that a Mamdani style of campaign messaging won't turn the tide in Ohio or Wisconsin or Iowa, for example.
And I don't think that his elite intellectual and artistic background is much of an asset in that regard either.
You know, it plays really well to a particular coastal elite audience.
I don't think anybody is dumb enough to copy paste his campaign to Ohio.
But I can imagine a male buckeye candidate doing something similar to deconstruct masculinity there by highlighting nurses and doctors, school teachers, women on farms, while pushing socialist policies.
Like Walls ran that software in Minnesota, and he did it with a lot of success.
But even then, I don't think the future is written with regard to red state sentiments because there are also Trump land voters who are remembering this buried labor history.
And I think the tariff destruction is probably going to bring that out even more.
And so when I talk to people like Nathan Evans Fox in North Carolina about Appalachian socialism, like it's there right at the surface.
It's small, but it's also vibrant.
Also, have you guys seen Nicoli Munro on TikTok, this southern content creator who calls up white Protestant churches?
And then she plays this soundtrack of a baby crying.
There's no baby there.
But there's a baby crying in the background of the call.
And then she asks the, you know, the person who answers the phone or the pastor if they have any baby formula to give or to buy for her.
Have you seen this?
Yeah, I saw that.
It's a really incredible and damning experiment, right?
Yeah.
So 33 out of 42 churches say no, but then she gets these imams on the line from the local mosque.
And when she does, it's these guys saying, okay, where are you?
And what brand do you need?
So I think things can change in really unexpected ways.
The other thing I want to do is to quote from one of the shows I did on Mamdani's parents.
It was called Nair, Mamdani, and Culture Against the Culture War.
And it was a double episode that was about how Mahmoud Mamdani is a giant in post-colonial studies, as you referenced, Julian, and how his mom, Mira Nair, is an incredible filmmaker in what film critic Amardeep Singh, who's an English profit at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, dubbed diaspora verite.
And what he says about this is that, quote, she uses the documentary and realist techniques she started her career with back in the late 70s to explore diverse experiences of migration and displacement.
Diaspora Verite is at the root of her commitment to social justice, especially with respect to women and socially and economically marginalized groups, unquote.
So Nair emphasizes this naturalistic acting over melodrama.
She minimizes narrative or visual manipulation on screen.
She films on location rather than in studio wherever possible.
She uses mobile eye-level cameras.
Can you see all of the influences on the campaign here, which often give kind of like an immediate home movie flavor?
She favors synchronous sound rather than overdubbing.
She hires amateur actors and so on.
And the scripts are all polyglot, Hindi, Punjabi, and English.
And Nair is also using these visual motifs, bridges, piers, boats, train stations, and shoes to represent movement, migration, and the fluidity of identity, and the hollowness of static stereotypes.
And that's all stereotypes.
So cultural, ethnic, religious, and I would also say gendered.
And when then we get to movement, Mamdani, Zoran uses the color coding of the Metro card in his campaign design, along with all of the Bollywood echoes of the signage that he grew up with.
But what stands out most to me is that he also grows up in a world of performance and fluidity.
He's on the set often as a child.
He's watching men and women and queer people come out of wardrobes ready to perform parts.
He's watched characters change and transform continuously.
They retain, but also deepen their humanity through their relationships and work as they go through these changes.
And in one of her most important films, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Nair tracks the winding life transformations of Chungaz Khan, who's this Pakistani Wall Street Gordon gecko acolyte whiz kid who realizes he will never be welcomed in New York after 9-11.
And so he goes back home to Karachi to meditate on what the good life really means.
And Zoron was 21 when his mom made that film, and he was super excited about it.
He said, mom, you have to do this.
Go and do it.
So how could this guy not become a walking anti-stereotype?
And I wonder if that actually is close to the heart of his attractiveness.
He's just so unusual.
Yeah, it's all beautifully said and described.
And I'm on the edge of my seat.
I think these are all qualities that the three of us find attractive and intriguing and admirable and exciting, along with most of our audience.
They're all qualities, too, that are incredibly easy for right-wing propagandists to frame as elite, subversive, emblematic of far-left, multicultural, commie-queer, rejections of American culture and family values in favor of some kind of diaspora aesthetic.
So I celebrate his victory alongside you, and I love everything you've been describing, but I also bite my nails a bit at how he's now set up to be the kind of bogeyman caricature from the now supposedly even more godless socialist New York City that bigoted populists use to stir up their audience.
Yeah, I think it's a question about how long people will buy how much bullshit.
You know, I saw Greenblatt of the ADL being put on blast by Joe Scarborough over opening a Mamdani snitch line on the day after the election when the White House and Tesla head office is being ignored by the ADL.
They're crawling with open anti-Semites and Tucker Carlson is platforming Nick Fuentes.
And so that kind of, I don't know, skepticism now, growing skepticism of certain sort of tropes that have been marshaled against Mamdani tells me that the bar is rising on how inanely this guy can be smeared going forward.
Speaking of stereotypes, how about Graham Plattner, the ex-Marine oyster farmer and Democratic primary candidate for ousting Susan Collins from her 28 years in the Senate representing Maine?
Does he bolster stereotypes or break them?
I think he walks the line between the two.
Like he bolsters on the aesthetic side, but breaks them on the caregiving and policy side.
Or at least he breaks the masculine stereotype of rugged individualism will rule all for those who forget or who never had a sense of how muscular the labor movement, for instance, has been in decades gone by.
But Plattner and Mamdani are running similar policy platforms.
Affordability, supporting the working class, raising the minimum wage, socializing health, childcare, mental health care.
But they cut really different figures, beginning with origins from opposing geopolitical stories.
We have the diaspora Muslim and the machine gunner sent to enforce U.S. objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Plattner is a testosterone mountain.
Derek, you noted the voice, which ranges from baso profundo gruff to boiling over baritone outrage.
And he's not cutting ads in Spanish or Urdu or Arabic.
He's not built his charisma on fluidity, but on a single steel cable of unified authenticity.
There's our word again.
And online, at least, that becomes an Achilles' heel when Politico digs up dirt on his Reddit comments and then his Totenkopf tattoo.
But Plattner does also show a kind of fluidity, or he apparently shows it, in his story about the development of his values and character.
And then that story itself demands a certain type of forgiveness or fluidity, you know, amongst the public, especially with regard to the question of can a person be many things?
Can a person change?
Yeah, one thing I found in reading up on him a little bit is that when asked by a journalist why he served in Iraq after having protested that war, his answer was, I thought we could do some good and I wanted to play soldier.
I may have read too much Hemingway.
Yeah, it's an adventurist statement.
Like he's actually indicating that he knows that the structure was wrong or it was false or that, but that somehow he could have some heroic purchase in it.
But even that, I mean, we're going to go into his history or what he says about his history.
Even that is anti-fascist coded because Hemingway went to fight for the international brigades.
So Plattner is flagging like a cognitive dissonance because he did not go to Iraq on Hemingway's ticket.
Now, the Reddit comments express socialist views through military humor, but there are red flags for racism and sexism.
So for instance, he wondered in 2013 why black people don't tip more in restaurants.
He's speaking as a bartender.
He used homophobic slurs and he minimized the impacts of sexual assault on the military.
But in many posts, he also just sounds like a tanky.
He's referring to police as bastards.
Rural white Americans are actually racist and stupid.
And he identified himself as a communist and expressed support for violent revolutionary action.
And then when confronted with these comments from his handle, P-Hustle, he owned them, apologized for the language.
And then he talked about having grown up and out of his post-war PTSD-ridden experience.
And so this had the air of both accountability and revelation.
He became the guy who is now fighting against the culture that had made him into a wounded warrior, fighting for, as he describes it, meaningless imperial causes.
I haven't tracked Plattner as nearly as closely as Mamdani.
I mean, I've never even been to Maine.
I lived in New York for 12 years, so I have a little more investment in that.
But it seems one crossover is that both men had to confront past statements that seem pretty extreme.
They were in certain cases, and both made amends of sorts with them and made their language broader and more embracing to a larger population without losing the underlying populism.
And both seem to be forgiven by their constituents.
I mean, we'll see how Platiner does when election time comes.
But Mamdani obviously was, I mean, I wouldn't think it was a question of forgiveness.
People just loved him.
And this is a relatively new course for Democratic candidates.
I guess the only question I would have with Plattner at this point is, you know, we've talked a little bit about authenticity and where it crosses over with morals, but it also comes to the question of how are you representing your past, which I think will be an interesting one to navigate because I'm a little more skeptical of Plattner, just given how many people in his life have come out kind of questioning some things he has said.
So that will bring another layer to the authenticity question to me when it comes to looking at his candidacy.
To your point, Derek, all of these outlets were digging out Mamdani quotes, but they weren't secret.
I mean, they were all made openly.
No, you know, Reddit handle.
Things about, you know, seizing the means of production and so on.
And they're not harmful, like off-color shitposts either.
And so, you know, as you said, I'm not sure anyone had to forgive that.
And he didn't either really walk it back, although he did say, I'm a democratic socialist when he asked the communism question.
So not really things to apologize for, but Plattner's situation really does beg the apology and for people to ask, like, has he really matured?
With Madami at Mamdani, it's more like, how is he going to finesse that?
But then we have the tattoo.
So October 20th, his campaign tries to get in front of another story by releasing a wedding party video in which he's shirtless and singing, and there's a Nazi Totenkopf skull and crossbones tattoo on his right pectoral muscle.
He claims he got it while drunk in the service in Croatia in 2007, that he had no idea what it meant.
And a lot of folks, including me, found this impossible to believe, given his military history, his knowledge of geopolitics, and his presumed commitment to anti-fascism.
Now, by October 24th, CNN confirms reports that as late as 2020 on Reddit, Platiner is discussing the strangeness of Nazi tattoos in general in the U.S. military on Reddit, saying that insignia like the double bolts could be used by white and black and Latino servicemen alike, presumably to signify ruthlessness.
So it looks to me like he likely knew what it was.
He tried to, you know, he tried on a lie to start out with his pushback.
But there's nothing in his Reddit history that shows affinity or sympathy for fascism.
It's all the opposite.
So is the truth about the tattoo either too complex or too stupid to try to parse out in the meat grinder news cycle?
I wonder if that's the calculation.
I'm curious, Matthew, if you had just seen an image of that tattoo separate from any text describing what it was, would you have immediately gone, that's a Nazi tattoo?
Yeah, I wouldn't have said totenkopf because I didn't know the German word, but I definitely knew it was a Nazi emblem.
It was on the villain's cap and in Glorious Bastards.
Like it's pretty out there.
I don't think it's obscure for people in military and gun culture.
From what I've read as well, most tattooists like West of the Balkans would not have that up in their shop.
So I don't know why he's flubbed this, but this part of the story highlights for me one of the subconscious anxieties around male and masculine figures and stereotypes, which is, is this person true to their word?
Are they dependable?
Will they turn on you, betray you?
Is their support for you conditional or not?
I think it's an anxiety that's a natural outcome of the patriarchal promise, which is if we maintain this kind of social order, you will be protected.
I think that messaging still holds sway in MAGA, but it just doesn't wash left of that.
There's too many bullies, too many abusive church ministers, too many warhawks, too many authoritarians who just give the lie to that promise of protection.
But neither Plattner nor Mamdani are offering protection.
They're offering support.
I believe the cultural echo of the betraying patriarch is so strong, however, that doubting them both from the left is simply going to happen.
Democratic voters in Maine have to decide whether Plattner really does have socialism in his bones or whether he's a cosplayer, whether he harbors a secret fascist streak.
You know, so far, they seem to not really care much about the tattoo, but that doesn't mean that the federal Democrats won't keep it in play.
I mean, is it that a Democrat ⁇ are you saying that Democratic voters in Maine are hopeful that he really has socialism in his bones?
Or are we talking about a kind of economic populist platform?
I mean, he calls himself a socialist on Reddit, but then he comes out and he says, of course, I'm not a socialist.
So I don't know.
And of course, is everybody clear on the definition of socialism?
You know, I don't know.
You might be right that they're going to be judging him on whether he is credible in economic populism.
I think that with Mamdani, this issue of potential betrayal is more complex, but no less profound.
And maybe it has higher stakes, because now that Mamdani has won his campaign, the DSA and pro-Palestine coalition that helped put him there is going to be examining his statements on Israel super closely, and they're already doing that.
So they're noticing that he's keeping on police commissioner Tish, that he's going to have, he's said he's going to have Zionists in his cabinet.
Of course, that could mean Brad Lander, who calls himself a Zionist.
And does he really want to help Trump justify invading Venezuela by low-key echoing White House talking points on Maduro?
They're talking about things like this.
And I think the stakes are higher in some ways, because in light of Mamdani's culture, education, family background, his longtime commitment to socialism, watching him drift towards the center to make good with the democratic infrastructure is really the stuff of left-wing nightmares because it would represent another huge waste of opportunity and watering down of the values that helped him win.
With Plattner, I think it's going to be a lot easier if it comes to it for people to shrug and say, well, you know, once a Marine, always a Marine, and let him go.
Yeah, I think you're right that it's more complex.
I mean, with regard to Maduro, I think Mamdani can accurately identify him as a dictator without somehow inevitably justifying war crimes against his people.
So I trust that someone as smart as Mamdani can walk and chew gum at the same time in this regard.
And I've also said and thought all through this campaign that Mamdani's ability to adapt in his political communication is one of his biggest strengths.
He did it extremely skillfully on the most contentious issue of our time over the course of the campaign, finding a way to both condemn Hamas and the genocide in Gaza at the same time.
I think it'll likely, as things play out, make him endure the same fate as someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in terms of being labeled a sellout by the DSA and other far-left groups.
But personally, I care less about that than about his ability to get things done for New Yorkers and improve life for all people there, especially those who need it the most.
I think his communications are good, but I think his strengths come from his values.
I also would disagree with some things because the DSA is not far left.
I think also that keeping pressure on your representative on things like post-colonial history and ethics isn't like synonymous with throwing him away.
It's not like these are like legitimate, long-standing political disputes.
I also think that criticism is also a form of engagement and relationship on the left.
It's even supportive.
But I think your points do underline the problem of trust behind Mamdani that I'm flagging.
So wait, wait, the DSA is not far left?
No.
No, they're a bridge party to the Democrats, to the Democratic Party.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I see what you're saying.
They don't field candidates.
There are communist parties, there are anarchist organizations, but the DSA is kind of like a broker between the two, between far-left organized politics, to the extent that there are any and there aren't much and the Democratic Party.
That's why they don't field candidates.
They're like, okay, what from this field of radical left people who are committed to electoral politics can we support on their entryist project into the Democratic Party?
That's what they're there for.
So they aim to support radical left candidates, but they're not far left.
They're not a, no, because they, to the extent that they believe in the efficacy of the Democratic Party, they're not far left.
No.
So to truly be far left, you have to have completely abandoned any hope of being able to influence or affect the Democratic Party in a positive way.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of evidence.
Collaborate with them, right?
Yeah, that it's very difficult that actually the view is the Democratic Party is beholden to the same donor class that the Republicans are.
And that, you know, so different party politics are required.
So the only candidate from those parties that could actually be endorsed fully could not run on a Democratic ticket.
What, like the revolutionary communists of America or something like that?
No, they wouldn't.
Yeah, they would have to win on that ticket.
They couldn't win as a Democrat in order to.
They wouldn't run as a Democrat.
Okay, so that answers the question.
Yeah, they wouldn't run.
Because as soon as they run, they bit by bit, they are drawn towards the party apparatus.
Bit by bit, they're drawn towards the funding structure.
They're going to have to compromise on what their actual values are.
So how many candidates from those parties have won in American politics?
Very few, Derek.
Very few.
Yeah.
So whatever version of masculinity Democrats put forward, I think for a lot of folks who are hyper-vigilant about betrayal, the line in the sand is going to be drawn on trust and consistency.
And just the last thought I had right before we started recording that I jotted down here is that I personally can't help but to imagine that something really, really old is being worked out with this.
I think, you know, we do a lot of spirituality and religion on this podcast.
And we've talked a lot about the dominant, you know, monotheisms at play in our political sphere.
And what they share is an eternally ambivalent father.
You know, the God who loves, the God who punishes, the God who provides, who takes away, the God who strikes down kings but also kills his son.
This is the God you can never quite trust until you reinvent him by rewriting the old stories.
