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Nov. 6, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:28:49
Why Did Zohran Win & What Does it Mean?

Glenn breaks down the NYC election results and discusses what Zohran Mamdani's victory means for the future of the city and Democratic politics. Plus: Breitbart's John Carney discusses his articles explaning Mamdani's popularity among downwardly mobile Park Slope young professionals.  ---------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook  

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Good evening.
It's Wednesday, November 5th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, in New York City last night, voters delivered an overwhelming and decisive victory to Zohan Mandani, who very few people even in New York City politics had heard of less than a year ago, and he's now going to be mayor of America's largest city.
The last night, Witnessed a virtually complete sweep of victories for Democrats in places like New Jersey, Virginia, even in Georgia, it was Mandani's status as a very outspoken critic of Israel, along with being the first ever Muslim to be elected to lead America's largest city and to self-describe socialist politics, which provoked an intense and often sometimes utterly unhinged national discourse about his candidacy and now about his victory.
We'll examine what happened last night and what it means.
And we'll also speak to Breitbart's John Carney, who wrote one of the most interesting and thoughtful analyses today of the voting blocks that actually delivered Mandani this sweeping victory.
And given that he's writing for Breitbart and other right-wing journals, focuses on right-wing misconceptions about exactly what that voting block is and why they voted for him.
Then former president, former Vice President Dick Cheney died on Monday at the age of 84.
The tributes that poured in from virtually every major Democratic Party leader, including past presidents and past Democratic nominees and his large liberal news outlets went far beyond standard condolences offered when a political leader dies.
In fact, these statements were so effusive that one would have thought that Dick Cheney was one of the most universally beloved and admired political statesmen in American history.
But actually, the opposite was true.
Not all that long ago, relatively speaking, Cheney was at least as hated by liberal power centers while in power as Trump is hated by them today.
And Cheney was typically maligned in exactly the same terms as Trump is now as some unique threat to all things decent, a threat to American democracy, someone who stole an election, the entire litany.
That Democrats in the media outlets this week, just a couple days ago, issued statements of great admiration and even veneration for Dick Cheney says a great deal about our political class and current political dynamic that really make it worth examining.
Before we get to all that, a couple of very quick programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
There is a very large gap, a large disparity between who Zoran Mandani actually is and the intensity of the political discourse,
both pro and con, that has emerged around him in the wake of first his somewhat surprising victory in the Democratic Party primary over Andrew Cuomo and then last night his expected but still quite decisive victory in the general election.
Zoran Mandani is now the mayor-elect of America's largest city, despite the fact that a year ago, even less than a year ago, even people in New York City politics barely knew who he was.
He was a very backbencher in the New York State Assembly, really had not been anyone who people were looking at for higher office.
He ran clearly a very well-constructed campaign, proved to be an amazing political communicator, no matter what you think of him.
He's somebody who exhibited a great deal of political charisma and political talent.
And I think like all successful people in general, successful people in politics, he had a lot of luck, excuse me, in running at the right moment.
There is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party establishment, especially among Democratic voters.
People talk often about how the Democratic Party has some of its lowest approval ratings ever.
And in part, that's because the Democratic Party is perceived correctly as standing for nothing.
But it's also true because even Democratic Party voters, people who have party allegiance to Democrats, are very dissatisfied with the leadership because they perceive they're too old, they're too ossified, they're not fighting enough.
And Zoront came at a time when people just wanted something fresh, wanted something new, and he satisfied that.
He was extremely lucky to have about the worst political opponent, the worst political adversary you could have, especially for the moment, but also in general, an Andrew Cuomo, someone who's not only been around for decades, but somebody who wore at his welcome in Albany as New York governor,
was chased out of office, with sexual harassment claims, had the COVID scandal where he consigned old people to die in nursing homes, was perceived correctly as this sort of beneficiary of a political dynasty, really representing the Democratic establishment and Democratic status quo at a time when people have never hated it more, including Democratic Party voters.
But then on top of that, you have the issue of Israel, which has galvanized young people in the United States on both the left and the right, but certainly for purposes of what we're talking about on the left.
And in American liberalism, people who were insistent that the Democratic Party candidate, first Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris, denounce what Israel was doing in Gaza, announced a policy that they would use the leverage of American arms to force Israel to refrain from the human rights abuses and the war crimes they were engaged in, and who refused to do so.
That clearly cost the party.
And Zoron, who has certainly bona fides and authenticity in his harsh criticism of Israel, comes along at exactly the right moment.
That is a critical issue for gaining credibility, especially among the party activists who drive the party primary.
And it's this confluence of events, some of which have a lot to do with him and his skills, some of which have a lot to do with his ability to read the political moment and to construct a very effective campaign that focused not on the weak issues for Democrats, but on affordability.
And then also some of the luck, including the circumstances, the serendipity that I just described.
But whatever it is, it was a remarkable political story for somebody to come essentially from utter obscurity to run against a very powerful political dynasty backed by all of the New York power brokers who have typically determined who the mayor would be, Mount Wall Street financiers and the real estate industry, the very powerful, wealthy financiers in New York City who can destroy or make a political candidate.
Obviously, virtually none of them was behind Zoron.
They were all determined to stop Zoron.
They consolidated behind Yando Cuomo, both in the primary and in the general election, and yet it didn't matter.
And a 33, I guess he's now 34-year-old New York State Assembly member who was completely unknown a year ago, has called from the beginning what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide, is not born in the United States, but was born in Uganda to parents of India descent, and who calls himself a socialist, is now the mayor-elect of America's largest city.
Can't deny that that is a very consequential event.
And the type of victory that he delivered, both in the New York primary and in the general election, is not just decisive in terms of the margin, but also in terms of the ability that he has and demonstrated to galvanize many types of voters who often don't vote.
Younger voters, voters in working class immigrant neighborhoods who essentially conclude that politics is not for them.
I remember in 2008 when Obama victory against John McCain was attributed to the fact that he inspired huge numbers of young voters who had never voted before.
And not just young voters, but non-white voters, black voters especially, who had a record of not voting in elections.
He inspired them to leave their house and to go vote.
And I remember at the time, political analysts describing that as being the most valuable political gold that a politician can possess, the ability to inspire people who won't vote even for their own party, but who are willing to go and vote for that person.
That kind of loyalty, that kind of ability to inspire is what Democrats have lacking.
And again, I'm just describing here the reasons for Zoron's victory.
It's not a positive or negative commentary for the moment on the substance of his views.
I'm just sort of, as I try to tell liberals, you have to acknowledge what Trump's strengths are, that he's funny, that he's charismatic.
Even if you hate him, you still have to acknowledge that.
I'm describing here what made Zoron's victory actually quite impressive, no matter your views on any of the issues that were at issue in this election.
And I think it's really worth breaking down not just the election itself and the victory, but especially the discourse that has been provoked by it and why, for the first time that I've ever seen, this consolidated effort by the Israel lobby, by oligarchs, really not just had no impact, but almost, I would say, probably backlashed, backfired in their efforts to take down his candidacy.
They didn't even come close.
Nothing they really did seemed the slightest bit effective for so many interesting reasons.
All right, here is Zoron delivering his victory speech last night.
Here's just a representative part of it.
Thank you, my friends.
The sun may have set over our city this evening.
But as Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.
For as long as we can remember, the working people of New York have been told by the wealthy and the well-connected that power does not belong in their hands.
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 last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater.
Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it.
The future is in our hands.
My friend, we have toppled a political Andrew Quast in private.
But let tonight be the final time I utter his name as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few.
New York, tonight you have delivered a mandate for change.
With the exception of his invocation of Eugene Debs in the very first sentence of that acceptance speech, Eugene Debs being probably the most prominent and influential and well-known socialist of his time, this victory speech, you know, all victory speeches sort of have a feel of excitement and novelty to them because somebody achieves a major victory, especially one as unexpected as his.
And they're filled and they're speaking to an audience filled with their most enthusiastic supporters who are cheering every word.
The energy in the room is very high.
They all have this kind of feeling of something momentous.
But if you actually read the transcript of the speech, which I did before listening to it, it's a very unspectacular and trite speech.
Pretty much every victory speech, no matter who the victor is in American politics these days, sounds these same themes.
Nobody believed we could do it.
We fought for, we took on the powers that be.
We are now going to defend the working person, the forgotten person.
This was Donald Trump's theme too in 2016.
And again, in 2024, this was Joe Biden's theme in 2020.
We're for the working class.
We're going to take down these special interests, the ones who opposed us, the people who've heard too long.
Society's been run for the benefit of the few.
This is politics one-on-one.
There's nothing, it may sound in Zoran's hands for some people who see him as a radical figure.
I'm not one of them, but for people who do, as something menacing or if you see him that way and you like it, inspiring.
But there's nothing really in that speech that I think is particularly meaningful, but you can sense the energy of the moment that for his supporters and again, for him, this is a victory that even if he ends up being a very kind of conventional politician, even if he tries to be as radical as some of his supporters hope he is, and he's not able to get it accomplished because New York City is a very complex place of power factions all over the place who will try and impede everything he's doing, which I think will be the case.
The fact that someone like him, who was opposed by essentially the entire billionaire class that dominates New York politics for decades, the reason why such a liberal city elected people like Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.
It's a place where those people do wield power.
The fact that in New York City, a place, New York City and New York State, long perceived as a place where you cannot succeed politically if you're not a fanatical supporter of Israel.
That's why every New York politician has been.
That's why Hillary Clinton became sounding like Benjamin Netanyahu when she wanted to run for New York Senate.
Obviously, Chuck Schumer.
For someone like Zoran Mandani, who stood up and has always opposed Israel, called what they're doing a genocide, for him to win, that is notable.
But I do have a lot of doubts, and I hope I'm wrong, that he's basically just going to be a kind of go-along to get along politician, hoping to advance his career to kind of avoid some of the pitfalls of creating political controversy by being a radical.
We'll see how all that goes.
I don't want to be too definitive.
I can't read the future, and I hope I'm wrong in this.
But there is something else very notable about what happened here, which is that once he won the Democratic primary, it's supposed to be a rule of Democratic Party politics and Republican Party politics that if you're an elected official in the party, you are duty bound to endorse the Democratic Party candidate.
If you're a Democratic senator, a Democratic member of the House, you're supposed to support the Democrat.
The Democrat meaning the person who won the primary of Democratic voters to represent the party, and that person was Zoran Mandani, and yet so many of them were clearly behind Andrew Cuomo and were very reluctant to endorse Zoran.
Hakeem Jeffries, the leading Democrat in the House, did so only at the last minute, very begrudgingly, and in exchange for some concessions, and Chuck Schumer never did.
And I think it's really interesting because after 2024, when Democrats tried to look into the mirror to the extent that they really ever do or could, and when media figures tried to do so as well, they understood, oh, one of our problems is young men just have turned away from our party.
The Democratic Party brand is poisonous among young men.
We don't inspire young people.
We don't have a Joe Rogan keeping ordinary kind of normies interested in our party.
And yet here's Zoran Mandani, who again, whatever else you think of him, did inspire huge numbers of young people, including young men, large numbers of young men, to not just vote for him, but to become very politically actively involved on behalf of the party.
He achieved what the Democratic Party is saying that it needs most.
And yet many in the Democratic Party establishment ran away from him.
Here from Politico, November 4th, Chuck Schumer ultimately rejects a Mandani endorsement.
Congress's top New York Democrat refused to say whom he voted for in Tuesday's mayoral election.
Isn't that amazing?
Chuck Schumer is a senior Democrat in Washington, and he wouldn't even say he voted for the Democratic Party nominee.
The New York Times, October 24th, Hakeem Jeffries gives Mandani a last-minute endorsement for a New York City mayor.
He kicked in his and dragged his feet the entire way in doing so.
Kamala Harris was asked about this and gave the most tepid answer September 23rd.
Kamala Harris gives Zoran Mandani a tepid endorsement, quote, I endorse the Democrat in the race.
Now, as I said, and we see this in Maine too, there's this candidate, Grant Plantner, although controversial, who has inspired a huge amount of excitement among young people nationally, among people who are very dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, very much in a similar way to Zoran Mandani, condemning the Democratic Party establishment, also calling what Israel is doing a genocide, advocating for cutting off arms to Israel.
And the Democratic Party establishment sees this person who is exciting voters, especially the kind of voters that they have failed to connect with for a long time and now have completely lost to the Republican Party, which are working class, working class people, younger people, who he is inspiring with big crowds.
And not only don't they want to support him, and this was before the whole scandal about his tattoos, which people in Maine so far seem not to care about at all.
But even before then, they decided that they wanted to support this utterly banal, unnotable, boring, uncharismatic, pro-Israel, pro-bipartisan dogma, former governor of Maine named Janet Mills, who's 77 years old.
And the only thing notable about her candidacy was she would be the oldest ever first-time candidate elected to the Senate.
Isn't that exciting?
Breaking the glass ceiling for octogenarians.
That's what the Democratic Party wants.
They want candidates they control, not candidates who they can inspire.
And it's bizarre to watch Democrats have engaged in this post-loss analysis in 2024 and to some extent realize their problem, but be incapable of actually embracing and supporting the people who might be able to help solve it because what they're most afraid of is having their big donor base and the establishment dogma that has ruled their party lose control of the people who are running in it.
Here's just a couple of examples.
Here's the New York Times, November 13th, 2024.
Trump's win leaves Democrats asking, where are our bro whispers?
We don't have any bro whispers.
We're losing all these men.
Men just hate the Democratic Party.
Quote, Democrats have widely acknowledged that they have no answer for the online ecosystem of conservative influencers popular with Jay-Z Met Gen Z men.
Some have argued for a rethink of media strategy.
Reuters, October 6th, Democrats want to reach young male voters.
How to get them is up for debate.
Rolling Stone, May 28, 2025, can Democrats save themselves by spending $20 million on a, quote, speaking with American mentor?
Rolling Stone spoke with the Democratic operatives behind the Sam Project, which is designed to help Democrats study and woo young men.
If you ever want some entertainment, you know, life can be stressful sometimes, like can be difficult if you want some escapist entertainment.
Go pick up one of these reports from some Democratic strategist firm that has been paid millions of dollars by the DNC or other dark money Democratic Party groups about their strategy for connecting with young Gen Z voters or young men who have abandoned their party.
Or go take a look at some of the new social media content that the DNC has poured huge amounts of money into.
They took this guy named Jamie Harrison who was once in the state house in South Carolina, I believe, but he's mostly been a lobbyist for corporations his whole life.
He ran the DNC.
And now that he's done, they thought a Jamie Harrison podcast would be something that would excite the young people who like the internet.
And I think he's averaging something like 800 views a YouTube episode, even though there's all kinds of money put into the production, put into everything else.
The mismatch between what these people think about the voters rejecting him and the voters themselves is the gap is almost impossible to overstate.
And it is amazing.
So here you have Zoran Mandani in the Democratic primary who won in large part because he had exactly what you would want as a political party and as a campaign.
He had thousands of young people who, you know, you're young, you can do whatever you want.
And they chose instead to spend their days canvassing for him, volunteering for him, being inspired by his candidacy.
They not only worked in the campaign and volunteered, but they turned out in huge numbers because they wanted to make sure that he won against Andrew Cuomo and they did the same in the general election.
So you have a bro whisperer.
It may not be the kind of bro whisperer you want.
He's not a bro whisperer who is going to serve the interest of big donors, maybe, or somebody who defends Democratic Party foreign policy or is going to be best friends with Chuck Schumer and his Wall Street financiers.
Although again, he may be all those things, but they're not certain and they're worried about that.
But he is somebody who inspired huge numbers of young people, young men in particular, to come out and vote, and yet the Democratic Party is running away from him as fast as possible.
It says a lot about who they are when they say they want to solve the problems, what they actually really mean by that.
Let's take a look at some of the data that we have so far about who are the people who voted for Zaran Mandani, who are the people who voted for Andrew Cuomo to see what it is that this tells us about how this electorate, at least in New York City, has broken down.
So let's take a couple of exit poll graphs by CNN.
Here's the first one.
And this is, I need this on my screen to be able to see it, which I don't have.
It's going to be up in just a second.
There it is.
So this is a breakdown by race and also by age.
And there's some really interesting aspects to this that show you exactly how this breaks down.
So first of all, let's look at gender.
So we were just talking about how Democrats are paying millions and millions of dollars to Democratic consultant groups, you know, like 45-year-old, 50-year-old guys who have worked in Democratic Party politics forever, or women who have worked on campaigns as some kind of communications director.
They're studying how to reach the kids.
And they're writing these cringe reports about how to get them on TikTok, how to get, and it's just, you can just read it and you know it's going to fail and then it does fail.
But here's young men, 18 to 29, exactly the demographic, or at least one of them Democrats have completely failed in attracting, in fact, have succeeded in losing.
Zoron beat Cuomo in this demographic by 67 to 26 percent.
67 to 26 percent.
That is a remarkable margin.
And that group made up 5% of the electorate, so not a huge part of the electorate, but that's young men 18 to 29.
Now you have men 30 to 44, so still considered on the younger side of the age demographic.
And essentially, it's exactly the same thing: 67% to 27% in favor of Mandami.
I mean, you can actually make the case that young men played a critical, maybe even a decisive role with these kinds of margins in delivering victory to Zaran Mandani, something that the Democratic Party has been completely unable to accomplish.
They finally found someone who can do it, and they're embarrassed by him and want to run away from him as quickly as possible.
And then you see just how generational it is.
Men 645 to 64, that's tied 45 to 45, then men older than 65, Cuomo wins 53 to 37 percent.
It's even more pronounced with women.
You have younger women, 18 to 29.
Look at that, 84%, 84% of women 18 to 29 who voted in this election in New York City, 84% voted for Zoron Mandani, only 12% for Andrew Cuomo.
And then women 30 to 44, pretty much similar breakdown as men, 65 to 30 for Zoran.
And then as you get women who are older, Cuomo starts to win, 43 to 48.
And then women 65 and older, Cuomo won 57% of the vote.
So Zoran was able to accomplish something that Democrats have not been able to accomplish.
And instead of saying, let's learn from him, their attitude is let's try and hide him and pretend he doesn't exist and distance ourselves from him.
You look at race and it tells some very interesting stories as well.
You have young white voters 18 to 29.
Cuomo wins by 60.
Mandani wins 66 to 30 percent.
White voters 30 to 44 percent.
Very similar margin.
And only as you get into older demographics does Cuomo start winning.
Black voters, young black voters, overwhelmingly for Mandani, 84% and 64%.
And even among older black voters, it's closer, but still an advantage for Mandani.
So this is the kind of galvanizing force that Democrats have lacked that Zaron Mandani achieved in attracting.
If I were a Democratic Party consultant, and I'm very far from that, you could even argue on some level I'm the opposite of it, but if I were that, I would look at this and would say, let's stop paying tens of millions of dollars to all of these consultants to write cringe reports about how we can reach the young kids on TikTok and YouTube only to watch our content despite having millions of dollars in production, not even be able to break a thousand views, and let's look at what Mandani did instead.
But they have the opposite view.
Now you can say, look, it's New York City, it's a little bit different.
It is different, but I don't think it's quite as different as people think because again, let's remember, it's not like New York City in citywide votes has been this bastion of left-wing politics aberrant from the rest of the of the country.
In fact, New York City is aberrational in the sense that it has been willing to elect and has elected more right-wing mayors than most other large blue city, blue cities in the United States have done.
Michael Bloomberg was elected three times before him, Rudy Giuliani twice.
He had Bill DiBasio thrown in there, but that he was hardly some rabid ideologue.
So it's not like New York City is just something you write off as some weird bastion of left-wing voters, but it hasn't been the case, in large part because New York City is so dominated by a lot of very powerful financial centers, by centers of political and economic and cultural power that are not nearly as radical or left-wing as its reputation would suggest.
All right, let's look at this by religion because this has obviously been a major source of discourse here.
You have Protestant Christians and Catholics who voted for Cuomo, gave a majority to Cuomo, but not a very large one, 48 and 52%.
And you have 43 and 33% of them voting for Mandani.
And then here's Jewish voters.
And of course, we've been told, and this has been one of the main media themes about Mandani, Jewish voters are petrified of Zoran Mandani.
His campaign is reeking of anti-Semitism, as is he, as is his worldview, as are the people on his campaign.
It's putting New York Jews in danger.
Somehow they're going to have to leave New York City.
They can't even be safe.
This has been by far one of the major attacks on Zoran Mandani with huge amounts of money, Bill Ackman and Michael Bloomberg in particular, pouring millions and millions and millions of dollars into anti-Zoran packs to promote this smear campaign, that he is somehow a unique threat to New York Jews, even though, not even though, but because of the fact that he is a Muslim critical of Israel and that's all it takes to be accused of hating Jews.
And yet, even if you look at Jewish voters, one-third of Jewish voters voted for Mandani, despite massive amounts of money, tens of millions of dollars designed to convince them that their lives are in danger and that he's a Jew hater and an anti-Semite.
Again, it is inconceivable in New York City politics to even be a little bit questioning of Israel, let alone vehemently opposed to Israel or critical of Israel, and win a citywide election.
And because Mandani was poised to do it, he attracted the wealthiest billionaires, the most Zionist billionaires, especially Bloomberg and Ackman, pouring unlimited sums into packs to destroy his reputation.
Completely failed.
A third of Jewish voters voted for Mandani.
And then for people who have another religious affiliation or no religious affiliation, which is a quarter of American, a quarter of voters in New York, no religious affiliation, they overwhelmingly voted for Mandani.
But that Jewish vote, you're talking about hundreds of thousands, probably close to a half a million of American Jews who heard all of this propaganda and went and voted for Zoran Mandani, a good reminder that a lot of people who purport to speak for major groups really have no business doing so.
All right, now I want to focus on a couple of the really fascinating parts of this campaign because there were in this campaign, despite, again, the very real possibility that Zoron Mandani will basically just be a standard kind of nice left liberal Democratic Party politician, not doing very much that's very controversial.
He'll be used by Republicans as kind of a fear-mongering tool, but it's possible his reality will be him being very accommodating, more so than a lot of people think, to the power center he's supposed to oppose.
Who knows?
Maybe he won't be, but there's certainly a big expectation.
But looking backward, there were definitely moments that were incredibly interesting for the moment that we're in.
And I think none is more so than the moment in the primary that was held, the primary debate in the New York City Democratic primary when you had Mandani and Andrew Cuomo and six or seven other more minor candidates who debated on television.
And the question that was asked, and it was obviously intended to see what Mandani was going to say, but it was asked of all the candidates is, if you were to win and become New York City's mayor, which country would you make as your first stop in a foreign visit?
Now, I'm not even sure why mayors make visits to foreign countries.
I suppose there are times when it's appropriate.
Maybe they have exchanges between cities or partnerships or some kind of trade deals.
I'm not saying I can never imagine it.
But in general, foreign policy is run by Washington.
Trade deals for states are run by governors.
It's certainly not something that would ever be, in the absence of Zoron and the Israel question, on the minds of anybody.
And yet, the Israel question is always on the minds these days of our elections and our media.
And so they asked this question.
And it's remarkable to compare how every person on that stage running for to be the nominee of the Democratic Party for mayor answered the question and how radically different the answer from Zoron was.
The first foreign visit by a mayor of New York is always considered significant.
Where would you go first?
That's right, the Saturns.
First visit, I would visit the Holy Land.
Mr. Cuomo?
Given the hostility and the anti-Semitism that has been shown in New York, I would go to Israel.
Mr. Tilson, where would you go?
Yeah, I'd make my fourth trip to Israel, followed by my fifth trip to Ukraine, two of our greatest allies fighting on the front lines of the global war on terror.
Mr. Mamdani.
I would stay in New York City.
My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs and focus on that.
Mr. Mamdani, can I just jump in?
Would you visit Israel as mayor?
I will be doing, as the mayor, I'll be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and I'll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether that's in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or at the subway platform, because ultimately we need to focus on delivering on their concerns.
And just yes or no, do you believe in a Jewish state of Israel?
I believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state.
As a state with equal rights.
I would not say it has a right to exist as a Jewish state.
And his answer was no, he won't visit Israel.
I said that's what he was trying to say.
No, no, no.
Unlike you, I answered very directly.
My goal would be to take my first trip to Israel.
My wife's life work in this area means a lot to our family.
All right.
It's such a kind of microcosm of American politics.
You know, I said this before, but for as long as I can remember, I can think of so many presidential and vice presidential debates where this was true, where you would have the candidates fighting over who is more pro-Israel.
But this isn't even a presidential debate where at least foreign policy should be asked about every aspect of it because it is the purview of an American president.
Why should a New York City mayoral candidate even have to talk about their foreign policy at all?
And it's true, Zoron has criticized Israel and its genocide in Gaza and U.S. support for it, but he didn't make that anything close to the centerpiece of his campaign.
That was raised by other people who thought that was his big vulnerability.
You could see how excited Andrew Cuomo was.
One of the most excited moments he had in the last, I would say, decade, but certainly when running for mayor, where he thought that was going to be what would turn New York residents against New York voters against Zoran Mandani was that he wouldn't vow that the, not just to visit Israel, but that that would be the very first country that he would visit.
And what Zoran said should be so unnotable that you shouldn't even have to say it as a politician.
You're running for New York City mayor.
You shouldn't have to say, my priority isn't going to be to go visit foreign countries and make pilgrimage to other foreign countries.
I'm running for mayor of New York City.
I want to govern New York City.
I want to focus on the lives of people who live in New York City, not in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
And yet in our politics, where the expectation is, is that you pledge loyalty to Israel, as you saw reflexively every other one of those candidates do.
They perceive these kind of political veterans, people who are not in contact or in touch with the prevailing new way of understanding these issues, especially among younger voters.
They thought that was a huge gap that was going to bring him down.
And he didn't say, I'm not going to go to Israel.
I don't want to go to Israel, but I'm going to go to all these other countries.
He just said, my focus is on Americans or New Yorkers in this case.
And I think that's what most people want to hear.
And yet they barely ever hear that.
And if they do hear it, they rarely see the actions that are followed up on it.
I thought that was one of the most notable parts of this election because it said so much not just about Zoran's candidacy and why he won, but also our politics more generally.
Now, I've talked about this before, but I didn't know much about Zoron at the end of 2024 or early 2025.
I knew he was a kind of left-wing assemblyman from Queens associated with DSA, but I didn't have an opinion about him.
I didn't know much about him.
I knew that he had cited my articles before.
I've seen him do that.
I knew he followed me online, but I didn't have an opinion about him at all, one way or the other.
And this was what really first not only caught my attention, but made me impressed with his political skills.
And I said it at the time.
It's not like I'm just saying it now in retrospect.
Like, oh, he won.
And I saw this early.
I actually went on Twitter and posted about this and recommended this video and said, this is really an interesting candidate and an interesting candidacy that I think could end up making a lot of impact.
And the reason for that was this was fairly shortly after Donald Trump won, beat Tamala Harris.
It was November 15th, so barely a week after Trump won.
And most Democrats were either in such meltdown, crisis, panic mode that they could barely speak.
They were in this daze for weeks, if not months, or they were just lashing out and calling everybody a racist and a fascist and a Nazi and warning that we were headed toward concentration camps and dictatorship.
And what Zoron decided to do, instead of being paralyzed with shock and fear or resorting to accusing people who voted for Trump of being racist and Nazis, was he decided to do something which politicians ought to do, but which they so rarely do, which is he just went not just on the street in some kind of photo op, but he purposely sought out the neighborhoods that had huge swings toward Donald Trump.
In fact, some New York City neighborhoods, and they weren't wealthy neighborhoods, they were mostly outer borough, multi-racial, working-class neighborhoods, had among the biggest shifts as compared to 2020 from voting Democrat, and they had the highest numbers of people moving, migrating to vote for Trump.
And he wanted to go find those people who had previously voted Democrat, but this time voted Trump.
And he wanted to understand why they did that.
He wasn't looking to demonize them.
He wasn't looking to impose preconceived notions on them.
He really listened.
And then he constructed his campaign around the answers that he was given.
And the way he asked the questions, the demeanor he exhibited, the respect he had for voters that wasn't contrived but was genuine and that they could see was genuine and so opened up and talked to him just really impressed me.
Especially because this is what you ought to be doing if you want to actually understand voters as opposed to manipulating them and controlling them.
Just take a look at some of what he did.
And even beyond the Zoron issue, it was super interesting to hear immigrant working class people in New York, black voters in New York, people in working class neighborhoods talk about why they voted for Trump.
Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
I didn't vote.
And why did you not vote?
Because I don't believe in the system anymore.
And did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
Yes!
And who did you vote for?
Trump!
Ah, the million-dollar question.
Trump.
Trump.
Donald Trump.
Well, actually, the early voter, I voted for Trump.
Honestly, I didn't vote.
Oh, she voted for Trump.
I voted for Trump.
I vote for Trump.
Me too.
Before I vote Democrat, at this moment, I voted Donald Trump.
Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx are two areas that saw the biggest shift towards Trump in last week's election.
Even more residents didn't vote at all.
They like Trump because they don't want the Palestinian, the brothers to kill the war in Ukraine, the Democrats giving all the money and the war.
This no good.
The swing is because people want lower prices.
probably believe that Trump would give them that.
Market crash hold on energy, gas, la comida.
Most of these people are working families.
They're working one to two, three jobs.
And rent is expensive.
Foods are going up, utility bills are up.
And that's your hope to see a little bit more of an affordable life?
Absolutely.
I mean, these are things you never hear from cable news studios or from the political class in Washington because they have completely different lives than the people that you watch their own talking to.
This is a much larger, much longer video, at least like 10, 15 minutes.
And it was the same sort of thing over and over.
Some of them talked about immigration, felt resentment that people are coming to the country illegally and getting more benefits than they, even though they were born in the United States, their families were here for generations.
And these were not right-wing ideologues who were saying, oh, I hate liberals.
These are people who are talking about just the kinds of issues that ordinary people actually care about and vote on that became the centerpiece of Zeuran's affordability campaign.
And that is, when you watch people who aren't professional junkies or political junkies who speak, you realize this in a very visceral way, the breach between our national professional political discourse and what most people talk about.
I'm not claiming to be in touch with it.
I grew up in it, but obviously my life is different now.
And I think you have to be humble about that.
And so when you see this, when you see polls, you can see the glaring disparity.
And the only way you can see that is by going like he did to talk to people.
Remember, throughout 2024, the overwhelming, predominant narrative of the Democratic Party about the economy was that the economy was doing extremely well.
Joe Biden had enacted legislation that in so many ways had improved the material well-being of the working class and the poor, but that they just didn't appreciate it enough because the Democratic Party wasn't communicating enough, or these people just can't comprehend why their lives are better.
And then here they are saying things like, we can't afford our rent, the rent keeps going up, we have to get two jobs, we can't take care of our kids.
And these two worlds are growing ever further apart.
It really is the Versailles model where the elite, the people who work inside the royal court in Washington live behind these walls.
They look at the peasants because they want to keep them under control and manage them, but they have no connection to them.
I'm not saying going one day and holding a microphone in front of some people's face is some impressive act of political authenticity, but he did this a lot.
And he shaped his campaign not on the basis of the Democratic Socialists of America political agenda or some left-wing dogma or on marks.
He shaped it on the basis of things he was hearing from New Yorkers about their everyday lives in a way that you and again, he could be the biggest fraud in the world, but the campaign itself was unusual and remarkable in how it did this.
I think one of the things that really amazed people and that for me was one of the best ads I've seen in a while is when Zoran, despite being a socialist, made an entire video on the struggles of small business owners to try and make profit given the realities of the economy in New York.
And he did so by focusing on what every New Yorker sees all the time, especially working class New Yorkers, which are street vendors, especially people who are selling haul in food trucks, and looking at the economic realities that these people who work extremely hard, you go to these food trucks, those people get there very early in the morning to accommodate people who are working early or they get there at lunch hour and work all throughout the night.
And these people sit in these trucks and they prepare food all day.
It is hard back-breaking work, good, honest, real work.
And he wanted to understand the mechanics of why they're struggling so much as a window into understanding why New Yorkers in general are struggling so much economically.
Just the kind of thing that our politics should so obviously focus on and yet listen to national political discourse.
How much do you ever hear of things like this?
New York is suffering from a crisis and it's called halalflation.
Today, we're going to get to the bottom of this.
How much does a plate of halal cost right now from this truck?
$10.
$10.
Chicken over Islam over $10.
$10?
When you're a street vendor, you have to pay for the food, the plates.
How much do you have to pay for your permit?
Before it was $22,000.
$2017,000.
How much does a license cost if you get it from the city?
I think $400.
And who are you paying?
The permit owner.
You're not paying the city.
No, no, no.
You pay the permit owner $22,000 just so you can sell this food.
Yes.
And who is this?
Random guy.
Have you ever applied for a permit?
Yeah, I'm applied.
And no come anything.
It's a long way.
Number $3,800 something.
After two years, you're number $3,800.
Yes.
These are the four bills that are sitting in the city council right now, which would give these vendors their own permits and make your halal more affordable.
But Eric Adams hasn't said a single word about them.
If you owned the permit, then how much would you charge for the plate?
$7, $8.
$8.
Would you rather pay $10 for a plate of halal or $8?
$8.
$8.
I think $8 is the way to go.
If I was the mayor, I'd be working with City Council from day one to make halal $8 again.
Oh, how would it taste?
Tastes like $10, but it should be $8.
You know, I mean, there's, I would almost describe that as libertarian.
It's kind of a grievance about the suffocating nature of utterly inefficient and pointless city government bureaucracy.
The need to wait four years to get a vendor license and in the process have to pay exorbitant fees that in turn result in an increase of price for the kind of food that working class people eat.
And it all explains why New York City is so expensive and offers very practical solutions.
You know, one of the reasons I always said that it was impossible, let's go back to Obama just to make it kind of less partisan, but one of the reasons why it was so difficult to demonize Barack Obama is because people had watch him with their own eyes and ears and brains.
And he seemed to them, no matter what was being said about him, like the opposite of some threatening radical.
And so it's very difficult to maintain this demonization of somebody who doesn't really seem scary to most people.
Unlike with, say, Hillary Clinton, where the attacks on her about being corrupt and kind of just hungry and thirsty for power and ambition in a way that would make her do anything, that did seem to resonate with how people perceive her.
That's the difference between a good politician and a bad one.
And one of the reasons why it was so hard to demonize Trump, as Hitler, as a dictator, whatever else Democrats were trying to depict him as, is because people have seen Trump for years, even before he was in politics, and that has never been their experience of him.
It doesn't even mean that that perception is right.
People can be very evil and create a facade of someone likable.
But if someone is likable, you cannot demonize them unless it corresponds to how they're perceived.
Anyone who watched all of that, so I'm going around and talking to food vendors about the difficulties of government inefficiency in very detailed ways, seemingly trivial ways, but that are important to working class people, you think they were going to listen to histrionic claims from Zionist groups that he's some sort of jihadist ready to murder Jews on the street, ready to send gunmen into synagogues and gun everybody down and to put women into burqas?
There's a gigantic cognitive dissonance between who he clearly is and how he's perceived on the one hand and the attempt to demonize him on the other.
That's why it failed so astoundingly.
Now, it doesn't mean that those attempts weren't made right up until the end and continue to be made.
There's obviously a huge panic about the fact that he just won an election, both in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, despite breaking so many of the rules that they had assumed were unbreakable, beginning with the fact that he's an unapologetic critic of Israel.
He promised during the campaign multiple times to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he came to New York.
To say that that position had always been unthinkable for somebody who wanted to win city ride race in New York City is to wildly understate the case.
And this is all part and parcel of so many other things that we've been over so many times, showing the unraveling of not just support for Israel, but the entire propagandistic understanding that has been fed to Americans about foreign policy and what our role in the world should be, that it's just fueling the panic even more.
But when things are driven by panic, they become less effective because they're not based in rationality.
They're just based in this frantic emotion.
Here's Oran at the end of his campaign, kind of summarizing what he saw as the focal point and primary theme of his campaign, which he stuck to from start until the end.
Joins us now.
And the communist joins us now.
How do you respond to that when somebody comes up to you and say, I can't vote for you because you're a communist?
I say, there are reasons you might not want to vote for me, but let's be honest about my politics.
I'm a Democratic socialist no matter how many times President Trump calls me otherwise.
Yeah, explain the difference.
What is the difference between a Democrat, a Democratic socialist, and a communist?
Well, I'm a Democratic socialist who's also a Democrat.
And when I say I'm a Democratic socialist, I explain it in the words of Dr. King from decades ago, who said that 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 what I actually find is that when you're speaking to New Yorkers, they ask you less how you describe your politics and more whether there's room for them in that politics.
And New Yorkers are asking me, does your politics have room for my struggle to afford my rent, my child care, my groceries?
And frankly, President Trump ran an entire campaign focusing on the cost of living, focusing on the promise of cheaper groceries.
And his inability to do so is now making him increasingly desperate to try and stop the campaign that will actually deliver on the same diagnosis that he shared.
There's a lot of truth to that as well, that a big part of the appeal of Trump's campaign was promising to material improve the lives of the exact kind of voters that Zaran Mandani targeted as well.
If he succeeds, he will be a popular president.
And if he doesn't, he won't be.
And I don't think that's been the focal point of the Trump presidency, to put that mildly.
It's been many, many other things and many other agendas besides the ones he promised.
And that's the reason why he's running into such difficulty.
Now, prior to Zoran's victory, we repeatedly reported on and dissected just how histrionic and change the reaction to Zoran was, largely driven by his criticism of Israel.
And now that he has actually won, that hysteria has transformed into something there may not even be English words yet invented to adequately describe.
Here's the always histrionic Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL.
And of course, as the head of the ADL, and this is true not just of groups that purport to speak for Jews, it's true for activist groups that purport to speak to every minority group.
They have a strong interest in only one thing: convincing the members that they purport to represent that they are in extreme danger, that they face all sorts of threats from every direction.
And that's why the organization that purports to defend them is in more need that is more needed than ever.
You have to send your money to them.
You have to make sure that they're strong and vigilant because the threats to the people they purport to represent has never been larger.
That's true for every one of these activist groups.
People represent black people or Latinos or gay people or trans people or whatever it is.
That always is the incentive structure that can never say, yeah, things are headed in a positive direction because that erodes the importance and necessity for their group.
Victimhood groups like this always have to maximize victimhood.
Nobody does that more eagerly than Jonathan Greenblatt, who somehow has what should be the very hard job of depicting American Jews, of all people, as the singularly most marginalized people in the United States.
And here he was on MSNBC in reacting to Zoran's victory, doing exactly that.
And I will tell you, I've gotten so many calls from Jewish New Yorkers who are alarmed.
Their kid was harassed in college, their child was bullied in K-12.
So here's what ADL is doing right now.
If you are a Jewish New Yorker, we have your back and we will hold Mamdani, Mayor-elect Mamdani, accountable.
Here is the official release today of the ADL, which is even for them kind of remarkable in terms of just how cynical it is and self-victimizing it is, how neurotic it is.
EDL launches an initiative to track and monitor the Mandani administration policies and appointment in order to protect Jewish New Yorkers.
Again, a third of Jewish New Yorkers who voted voted for Mandani.
Quote: Today, the ADL announced the launch of a comprehensive initiative to track and monitor policies and personnel appointments of the incoming Mandani administration and protect Jewish residents across the five boroughs during a period of unprecedented anti-Semitism in New York City.
Quote, Mayor-elect Mandani has promoted anti-Semitic narratives associated with individuals who have a history of anti-Semitism and demonstrated intense animosity towards the Jewish state that is counter to the views of the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers.
All right.
Note the conflation immediately there because he says Mayor Elect Mandani has promoted anti-Semitic narratives.
I'm thinking to myself, which anti-Semitic narratives are those?
I've never heard Zoran Mandani promote narratives that I would regard as even remotely anti-Semitic.
Presumably that's true of the huge number of Jewish volunteers and campaign staffers who are surrounding him and work to make him mayor, nor to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish voters who actually just went and voted for him.
So I'm thinking to myself, what does the ADL mean specifically?
There aren't really any specifics here.
What anti-Semitic narratives has Zorad Mandani promoted?
And then we get to what it actually means.
When it says, and demonstrated animosity toward the Jewish state.
Of course, that's what the anti-Semitism is about.
One of the ways that you know that you're being manipulated and deceived through language and propaganda is when Israel was referred to as, quote, the Jewish state.
Israel is a foreign government.
This is designed, this description, the Jewish state, to equate criticism of Israel with criticism of the Jews.
It would be like if you criticize Saudi Arabia, which people do all the time.
Saudi Arabia is a Muslim state.
And if you described it that way, it would make it seem like if you criticize Saudi Arabia, you are being Islamophobic.
And everyone understands that's a joke.
Of course, you can criticize the Saudi government without being Islamophobic.
Plenty of Muslims criticize the Saudi government.
No one would ever remotely believe that criticizing the Saudi government is tantamount to criticizing Muslims in general or being anti-Muslim.
And I guess if you wanted to try and equate those things, you would describe Saudi Arabia not as Saudi Arabia or the Saudi Arabian regime, but as the Muslim state.
That, of course, is what is meant by anti-Semitism in the hands of the ADL and increasingly people who just wield that term as a way of suppressing debate and trying to destroy the reputations of people like Zoran who are critical of Israel.
It goes on.
We are deeply concerned that those individuals and principles will influence his administration at a time when we are tracking a brazen surge of harassment, vandalism, and violence toward Jewish residents and institutions in recent years, said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL's CEO.
ADL will launch a public-facing tracking monitor, policies, appointments, and actions by the Mandani administration that impact Jewish community safety and security, drawing from tip line reports such as enhanced ADL research capabilities.
The Mandani monitor will provide transparency around city hall decisions affecting Jewish New Yorkers, including education policy, budget priorities, and security measures.
So this is the kind of narrative about racism, about shutting down debate with these kinds of accusations that American conservatives have said forever.
They hate when the left does.
I've supported that grievance, that critique.
And yet this has become essentially, not essentially, overwhelmingly the primary tactic for dealing with what has become this extreme fear pervading a lot of different political factions, both in conservative and liberal, Republican and Democratic Party politics, when it comes to people who critique Israel.
Their only chance is to equate it with accusations of racism and anti-Semitism.
And just like the attempt by liberals to do so, capitalizing on things like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, which gave them this sense that they were really winning the culture war in a way that made them capable of doing anything, going as far as they want with no backlash, only to then discover that if you go around calling everybody these names, at some point, not only does it lose its meaning, you create a backlash against people who are wielding this tactic.
The same exact thing is happening the more they just lash out with these anti-Semitism accusations, when what they really mean is somebody is critical of the Israeli government, the more and more this support unravels, the more the panic intensifies and it becomes this infinite cycle, this loop that they can't escape.
Lots of things have been contributing to this, polling data, the abandonment of Israel by young Americans, certainly the election of Zarat Mandani.
And I think the reaction to his election will ultimately prove more important than what he's able to do as mayor itself.
All right, we're going to talk to our guest in just a second who, as I said, wrote an article I find extremely insightful.
This was actually after Bandani's primary win about who these people are who voted for him and what the misconceptions are about them.
That certainly applied to the election last night as well.
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John Carney is the finance and economics editor at Breitbart News, where he's written some of the sharpness analysis, in my view, of Mayor Lachsar on Mondani's proposed economic policies.
He's also a former Wall Street Journal columnist where he joined, where he covered New York finance.
And he joined us tonight to discuss why Mandani's platform resonated so strongly with a lot of voters in what seem for a lot of people to be affluent, highly educated areas.
And while many of them are educated, they are certainly not elite or affluent.
And he talks about some of the right-wing misconceptions of the kinds of voters who got attracted to Zaran's candidacy.
And it's an article that, as I said, was written after his primary win, at least is applicable now after the general election.
I think it deserves a lot more attention, both the article and the dynamic it describes.
And so we are happy to have him on the show.
John, good evening.
It's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
I did write that article, by the way, after he won the primary, but there's an update that I put out on Breitbart Business Digest, which is a free daily newsletter I put out that today updates it for the election that just happened.
And tomorrow we'll have a follow-up with even more sort of insight into what we can learn from the Mamdani phenomenon in New York.
Yeah, thank you for clarifying that because actually we had some confusion itself.
I had read the article and what I had written was you wrote it for the election.
My colleagues had seen the version that came after the primary and they said, no, I think you're confused.
It was after the primary.
So that's what explained the misconception.
So yes, it was both.
And so the version I read and the version that you wrote then, I think, is what I want to talk to you about.
So before we get to the specifics, let me just ask you this because I think a lot of people are going to be saying, okay, you're somebody who has been in media for a long time.
I was just talking about the kind of big breach between a lot of people who work in media and then the kind of voters that they're supposed to be analyzing who formed a lot of Zuran's voting base.
And they'll hear that you're someone who works for Breitbart and you're writing about kind of liberal left voters in various sectors in Brooklyn that form liberal left media.
And they'll say, what does this guy know about that?
He's kind of like one of those New York Times reporters who goes to Iowa or Ohio and writes about people like they're on a field trip studying exotic species.
But actually you have a lot of up close and personal interaction with and knowledge about the people you're writing about.
Explain what and why that is.
Sure.
Well, first of all, I am a native New Yorker.
I was born and raised in New York City and I lived for a dozen years in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the very area I'm writing about.
And I still have lots and lots of friends who live in what I would call the gentrified neighborhoods of Brooklyn.
So these are areas a lot of times that were heavily black, Hispanic, or actually Orthodox Jewish that have now become sort of young white professionals, really multicultural professionals.
White is not quite right.
It's actually the multicultural college graduate and often with graduate degree professionals that are doing pretty well in life.
You know, they earn incomes that would be impressive in a lot of the rest of the country, but don't get them very far in Brooklyn.
I was one of those people.
I lived in a four-story walkup where I was raising my daughters.
We had about 1,200 square feet.
We were lucky and we could afford a pretty nice apartment.
But it was, for a lot of Americans, I think, when they hear the kind of numbers, oh, you know, they pay $4,000 a month in rent.
It must be luxury, but it's not.
It's quite small spaces.
And in fact, we left during COVID because it was too small when everybody was locked up in their homes.
You know, one of the things that I think that is such an important nuance in what you wrote, and I think, you know, as I was reading it, I realized that I had fallen prey to this as well.
You know, and a lot of it is just generational.
It's like how you grow up understanding things.
And that understanding may be true at the time, but it doesn't always stay that way.
And you might be a little bit slow to understand it was, you know, when I was growing up, there was a almost complete correlation between education and how one was doing economically.
So that if you did go to elite educational institutions or even completed four-year college, did some graduate school, it was a pretty safe bet that you were somebody who was not struggling economically in any real way.
You were likely to be somebody who had at least a good middle class life, if not with prospects for more.
And it would be absurd to call people like that economically struggling.
But one of the points you make in your article is that you can go to four-year colleges now.
You can even go to grad schools now.
And that guarantee is gone in terms of making sure that you have a life that is anything resembling elite.
I'm not saying, and you go out of your way to say, it doesn't mean you're adequately described as impoverished or even like working class in the traditional sense, but you're nowhere near this kind of like caviar liberal, you know, sipping $180, $500 bottles of wine in the Upper East Side, and then whining about economic problems.
How is the reality, either in New York or just more generally for those kind of people?
Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right.
Look, a lot of people have called them like champagne liberals, champagne socialists.
I think that's wrong because these people actually do face a very precarious economic situation.
And it's one that's pretty new.
You're absolutely right that there used to be a sort of implicit promise.
You go to college, you graduate, particularly you go to, you know, these are people a lot of times who went to very good colleges.
Many of them have graduate degrees of some sort, professional degrees, master's degrees, law degrees, and yet they still lead pretty precarious lives economically.
They can't afford a place where they can raise a family.
The deal that seemed to be offered for generations for Americans that, you know, that their parents had a lot of times if they were raised in New York City, or that was available at least to people who were like them, who moved out from somewhere else, from Missouri or from Iowa, came to New York or went to an East Coast college, moved into New York, got a job that they thought would put them into a middle-class life and hasn't.
And the causes of this are both mysterious to people, but also treated as inevitable.
Like, why?
There's nothing you can do about it.
Just lower your expectations for your life.
Now, this resonated with me, Glenn, because I've been doing economic reporting for a long time.
And before that, I had actually helped campaign for Pat Buchanan's campaigns in the 1990s.
And I heard the same thing being told to manufacturing workers.
There's nothing you can do about it.
It's inevitable.
Don't even wonder why it's happening.
And the politicians basically shut them out.
Well, look, Donald Trump got elected in part because people were tired of being shut out.
And so one of my insights here is the very same thing is now happening to these young professionals in our cities.
They are also being told, and actually some of the rhetoric is the same, even coming from conservatives, you'll hear them say, why do you keep living there?
Right.
When we heard that people tell that to people in Ohio, we said, that's awful.
Why are you telling people like adjust your expectations for your life downward, move out of the community you chose to live in?
It's your fault that you are not doing well in life.
Well, now that's being directed, frankly, by some conservatives at these people who are also suffering economically.
And I don't think that's the right approach.
I think it's actually better to realize that the complaint they have is real.
One of the reasons Mandami got elected is because he stopped telling, he wasn't going to join the club of telling people, yeah, there's nothing that can be done about your life, just lower your expectations.
He said, he gave them a message of hope.
There is something that can be done.
I mean, frankly, it's very Trump-like in that way.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the point I wanted to make.
I remember I think 2016, the 2016 election was such a historic election in so many ways, not just for the obvious reason that someone like Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, but because of what it revealed about the American experience after things like the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, just so many shifting dynamics that we've had for decades shaping our politics from globalization that changed, the uprooting of economic security.
And, you know, a couple of things that I remember so clearly about that is, you know, there were a lot of people, like millions, who twice voted for Obama and then voted for Trump.
There were people who would say, my two favorite candidates in 2016 are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
And this to like the standard kind of Washington insider, the pundit, the reporter, the political operative makes no sense, right?
It's all right versus left.
How can you go from Barack Obama to Trump or Bernie Sanders to Trump?
And yet the thing, of course, they all have in common is their attempt to funnel this frustration with people's lives and how the political system is ignoring it.
And what you're describing, I think a lot of people on the left would hear it and say, wow, someone at Breitbart is talking about, you know, college graduates and journalists and media people and people in professional jobs in Brooklyn who are struggling economically or Joe Ron's ability to speak to them.
One of the reasons why I've been so convinced for so long that left versus right is not the way to understand politics so much.
It's not entirely relevant, but I don't think it's the predominant one.
I think it's more this pro and anti-establishment is because it does seem to me neither to be a left or a right issue or to be both the left and the right issue, depending on who is more successfully channeling it and understanding it and speaking to it.
I think the right has been more successful than the left has, like Zo Ron's an example of the left doing it.
But do you agree with that that the right has been more successful in recognizing that and talking to it?
And if so, why do you think that is?
So I think, yes, I definitely agree that the right has been better at it.
There was actually a 20 years ago, people really didn't believe that the Republicans could ever either bring themselves to become a party advocating for America's working class, for the rust belt for manufacturing.
These were traditionally often Democratic strongholds.
People didn't think the Republicans could become that party and they didn't think the voters would ever migrate to the Republican Party.
Well, that was a successful process.
We did that.
I'd like to think that we sort of set the stage for it in the 1990s when Pat Buchanan ran in 92 and 96 and 2000.
I think we were greatly assisted by the things you just, you know, the terrible Iraq war, the financial crisis broke people's attachment to the establishment.
And so one of the things when I look at what's happening now is, look, we have a volatile electorate, these professional precariates, as I call them.
They're not attached to the Democratic establishment.
A lot of conservatives right now are thinking, oh, well, those are just liberals, right?
But they're not attached to, they voted against one of the royal families of the Democratic establishment, frankly, the Cuomos.
And they elected a guy who is definitely an outsider.
Sure, that conservatives are like, well, his parents were successful and his mom made movies and they call him a Nepo baby.
I think that's all wrong.
He was, you know, Donald Trump was a billionaire, yet he could represent the outsiders, yet he could represent the forgotten man.
Mandami, yes, comes from, maybe it comes from money.
I don't really know his background that well.
But what I will say is he can, he showed that he is willing to represent this.
And conservatives really should be aware that, yes, we've done a great job of broadening our coalition.
It has brought Donald Trump to the presidency twice, but we don't have a lock on it.
If we start to behave like the establishment, start to dismiss people's genuine concerns, then just naturally, there will be another political force to rise up to bring them into their coalition.
You know, Joe, what's so interesting to me is that, you know, Donald Trump called these people the forgotten people, like the forgotten men and women.
And it was so apt because it's so true, like you never hear from them or their lives, except in the most abstract ways.
And as a result, it is true that their expectations are so low.
One of the things I remember so clearly from the 2016 election, it reminds me so much of what happened with Zoran.
Hillary Clinton kind of notoriously went to West Virginia and she told them, forget about coal.
It's not coming back.
Like accept the fact that your jobs are gone, that the whole industry on which your generations of family have depended, that's gone.
And she didn't really offer them any solution, just kind of said, you know, we're going to take care of it in some way, but you need to accept that it's gone.
Trump came to West Virginia a month later and he said, we're going to bring back your coal jobs.
And I remember they interviewed coal miners and members of the union who work in coal and reporters asked, do you believe Donald Trump that he's going to be able to do this?
And a lot of them said, not really, but at least he is understanding the problem.
He's speaking about our problems.
He's telling us he understands why it's been so tumultuous for our lives.
And that's better than someone coming and telling us, move on.
And I know there's a lot of people on the right who, when hearing your analysis and what I'm saying, will say, well, they're electing a socialist.
That's going to only make their problems worse.
And I think one of the things that was so amazing about Zoran's campaign is you look at these videos he's did and he's talking about, you know, why street vendors have such a difficult time making a living because city bureaucracy makes it impossible for them to get a license.
There's all these fees that are unnecessary that eat into their profits.
That in turn drives up the cost of halal, the things that most people actually think about in their daily lives, but that you never hear about in our national political discourse.
And it seems like any politician who can get past that, can find a way to speak to those people and to the things that they think about rather than what's said on Fox and MSNBC is going to have a great deal of success in our current political status, whether on the left or the right.
I think that's right.
I think that sending people the message that the job of the politicians is just to manage the decline of your life, that you should just get used to things being much worse for you than they were for your parents or than you were led to expect is a failing political message.
The winning political message is, I am going to help fix the problems that are facing your life.
I'm not going to dismiss them.
I'm not going to tell you that they are not really a problem, or that you should just move, that you should, everything about your life should change.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to come up with solutions.
Look, I am not a socialist.
I think a lot of Mandami's plans are not going to work out, but I understand why people are attracted to him.
I mean, frankly, I couldn't tell you what Andrew Cuomo's plans were for the city.
I don't think he had any.
Curtis Slewa, who I sort of admire his life story, but he was not a serious candidate ever.
He was never going to be mayor.
So people were really faced with the choice.
Is it going to be the dull establishment Cuomo who is promising nothing to improve people's lives or Mandami who actually has some plans to try to improve people's lives?
And frankly, I'd rather have a guy with some plans who's going to come in and maybe he'll learn.
Maybe he'll figure out like that free buses don't work or that state-owned grocery stores are a bad idea.
And then he'll try something else to try to improve things.
But at least he has the right idea that people have real problems and they really deserve them to be addressed rather than dismissed or derided.
Yeah, and I think, again, if you look at the politicians we were just talking about, Obama, Trump, now Mandani, one of the benefits they all clearly have in common is they're kind of just very new and running against people who are the opposite of new.
And I think at some point, you know, people are dissatisfied with the status quo.
The worst thing you can do is continue the status quo.
The new person might not make it better, but at least the ceiling is higher.
They might actually be different.
Let me ask you the last question because you mentioned your work with Pat Buchanan.
And I always try and spend, we've done a lot on the show where I, you know, because political memories are so short and you always forget as you get older that there are actually people who are younger than you who didn't live through the things that you lived through, who consider it dead history and don't have the access to it that you do.
But in so many ways, you look back at Pat Buchanan's challenge to the Republican establishment.
You know, the first thing he did was despite working for, you know, he worked inside Republican politics, of course, as you know, in the Dixon and then Ford and then Reagan administrations and then challenged the sitting president, which is something you don't do, in George H.W. Bush, on the grounds that, you know, essentially they were starting to serve globalist interests, that they had forgotten about the working person, very anti-immigrant, that that was all a way of serving big business at the expense of the working person.
You had Ron Paul, who had similar themes.
I mean, not at all the same, but kind of tapping into this very similar outsider anti-establishment ethos that I think paved the way in so many ways for what then enabled the space to exist in the Republican Party to hear Donald Trump's anti-establishment message.
Can you just talk a little bit about Buchanan's role in that?
Like in terms of both what we've been talking about specifically here and trying to point out well before a lot of other people realized it, that our political system was moving away from the working class base of the United States and not just ignoring them, but destroying their future, but also just more generally, this anti-establishment politics that he kind of either recognized or fueled or both in the Republican Party.
Yeah, so Pat Buchanan was actually one of the architects of the strategy that helped Nixon get elected in the first place, which was this idea that we were going to appeal to the silent majority, that we weren't going to let the party be run by special interests.
In fact, we were going to run against it.
But he saw the Republican Party under George H.W. Bush drift in that direction, drift towards globalism, drift towards doing trade agreements that were detrimental to Americans, drift towards wars that we had no business being in.
He opposed the very popular Persian Gulf War, which was the predecessor to the initially very popular Iraq war that then ruined George Bush, George Bush Jr.'s presidency.
But Pat was one of the problems Pat faced when he was trying to challenge George Bush, and he did very well both in 92 and in 96, was that he was pointing out that these things were going to happen.
He said, look, trade with China will be very bad.
These trade agreements are going to destroy our industrial base.
These wars will be a disaster.
And a lot of people said, you know what?
You're just too negative.
And immigration as well.
And immigration as well.
Immigration.
Yeah, warnings as well.
Yeah, yeah.
immigration you know and so a lot of people just thought like they he they had a i remember one of the digs against it was that he was preaching fear but he did lay out these ideas and i think they they were started to grow further as you were no longer preaching fear but able to point out that the that it all happened so by the time donald trump comes around in 2015 he no longer has to say i think this will go very badly
He can say, it's gone very badly.
So the things that Pat had to try to persuade people were coming had come, had occurred.
The wars were terrible.
The trade had gone terribly wrong.
Immigration was out of control.
The elites didn't want to do anything about it.
Donald Trump said, I will.
Pat had, I wish to God that we had listened to Pat Buchanan, elected him president.
We could have avoided all this.
But you know, it's sometimes you do have to, you know, stumble, take the hit before you learn, you know, burn your hand on the fire before you learn to pull it away.
And I guess that's what America had to do.
Yeah.
And they're just people who come before their time in a way, you know, are sort of ahead of their time.
And in some way, they play an important role in history.
And by the way, if you want to go and read probably the most prescient and unflinching opposition to the invasion of Iraq, you probably, I would recommend, above anybody else, going to read what Pat Buchanan was writing in 2002, 2003, not just about what would happen, but the forces of neoconservatism that drove it and continue to be at the center of a lot of our political conflicts.
All right, John.
Well, congratulations on both the original article and the updated version, both of which we will link to.
I really found it eye-opening myself.
I think everybody else will as well.
And we really appreciate coming on.
I enjoyed talking to you.
Thanks.
And tomorrow in Bright By Business Digest, we'll have yet another one.
So I'll give you even more.
3.0.
All right, great.
Perfect.
Thanks so much, John.
All right.
We had planned to do a final segment on the Democratic reaction to the death of Dick Cheney, who 25 years ago was a Nazi war criminal and a corrupt election thief, but now is a resistance icon.
The New York Times actually called him the voice of the resistance.
But because of time constraints, we decided we're going to leave that until tomorrow.
It is something I want to cover, not just for entertainment value, and there is entertainment value in it, but also because of what I think some of the lessons are that we can take for it about current politics and how to listen to political discourse, especially when it comes from politicians and how sincere or insincere they are about even some of the heaviest and gravest claims that they make.
But we will get to that tomorrow night.
I think there was so much interesting stuff in the New York election, the constituency.
I thought John's article in particular was really illuminating.
I do encourage you to go read it.
It's not very long, but it's really packed with dense insights that are really worth your time.
Otherwise, that concludes our show for this evening.
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