In this preview of The Weekender, Jared Yates Sexton gets into the miraculous victory by Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the fallout among the rank-and-file Democrats. For subscribers, this turns to an analysis of why the fearmongering and slandering didn't work this time, comments on the Pentagon leaks regarding the failed attack on Iran and the whole war debacle, rumors of the 2024 Election being stolen, and a deep dive into the awful (but revealing!) Ross Douthat interview with Peter Thiel.
To gain access to the full show, and to support The Muckrake Podcast, head over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patron.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey everybody, welcome to the weekender edition of the Muck Reich podcast.
I'm Jared EH Sexton.
My friend, my compatriot, Nick Houseman, is out of the country, and we are all thinking of him and sending him our thoughts and our love that he is having a decent time in the country of Japan, and that eventually he will come back to us in one piece and unbothered by, well, there's no other way to put it, the authoritarian border guards that currently control exit and entry from the United States of America.
I'm going to do my best to hold down the fort while Nick is gone.
I'm going to have some guests, some conversations, but today you got me, just me, and we have a lot to talk about.
We've got incredible seismic election changes that the Democratic Party and people around them should be paying attention to.
We've got a very strange situation that has emerged around the quote-unquote war with Iran, which I think that we can learn a lot from this.
We're going to talk about a lot of narratives that are going on that revolve around the 2024 election and the 2016 election.
Yeah, there is a lot to get into today and a lot of other things to discuss.
So I hope you'll stick around.
I hope that you will join me for this conversation because there's a lot here that I want to get into in terms of analysis that you wouldn't hear otherwise.
A reminder, head on over to patreon.com slash MikeRegpodcast.
Support the show.
Keep us editorially independent, ad-free.
And also in the midst of all of this, we support your faith and your trust.
And it has meant everything to me.
It's meant everything to Nick.
And hearing from people who are getting tired of corporate wealth class media and have decided to help out the people who really want to have actual conversations.
And that's patreon.com slash monkragpodcast.
I want to start today by talking about the New York City mayoral primary election where state assemblyman and Democratic socialist Zoron Mondani defeated disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo, who enjoyed all Democratic establishment support, mountains upon mountains upon mountains of wealth class cash and corporate media support.
I do think that this is a very large deal.
I always want to caution people whenever they take something like a mayoral primary or election or some of these special elections that pop up.
Our political media really loves to focus on these things and extrapolate out from them.
In this case, the question has been whether or not this is the moment that the Democratic Party changes and moves more towards the left or more towards democratic socialism, which they should do and would help them out, particularly electorally,
but it would not help out their bottom line because they are beholden to a class of billionaires and millionaires and the professional managerial class that does not particularly want these things except for you look at all the polls, you look at what the people are saying, where the people are showing up, where they're putting their energy, where they're putting their focus, where the conversations are going.
And it's obvious that this is the way forward if they're more interested in actually winning elections, actually changing things than they are simply keeping their donor base home.
What Mom Dani was able to do here, and I do want to go ahead and give him credit because I think there are things to learn from his campaign that Democrats should pay a lot of attention to.
But I also want to caution away from cults of personality and quote-unquote great men of history narratives.
We like to go deeper than that.
We like to have actual discussions about what is at the heart of these things.
But Mom Dani ran an incredible grassroots, small D Democratic campaign.
He went out into New York City, engaged in relentless retail politics, which a lot of our politicians at this point have no desire to do because they don't particularly want to spend time with an electorate that is going to tell them how badly they suck.
This was a really, really big upset that took not just time and energy and order to pull off, but also it took the people of New York to pull this thing off.
It seemed like Andrew Cuomo, an absolute creep who never should have run for an office again, who should have just spent the rest of his life making millions, if not billions of dollars by representing people like Donald Trump in court and through law firms.
It seemed like it was his nomination to lose.
There seemed like there was an air of inevitability here that Momdani was able to crack.
And a lot of why this was able to occur was not just the talent of Mom Dani, which is considerable, and the people around him, which is considerable.
But the credit goes to the people of New York who were able to move beyond the slander and libel thrown at Mom Dani, the hateful tactics, which we'll get into more in a little bit, but also a fear of this inevitable loss that people thought that they were going to suffer.
We can spend all of our time looking at polls.
We can say who's up, who's down.
But if people don't go out and vote with their heart and their conscience and based on morality and ethics, if they don't do that, there's no way to win, which is something that has held the Democratic Party captive for a very, very long time.
You have to risk losing in order to actually win and accomplish anything.
And in that regard, the victory here is not just with Zoran Mamdani.
The victory is also with the people of New York who heard what he was talking about.
A very, very common sense platform.
Childcare, transit, living wages, cost of living help.
Those types of things are what the people of New York deserve, and what you deserve, and what I deserve, and everybody out there deserves.
And we are held such captive by all of these narratives that are spun out by people like the rank-and-file Democrats that tell us that these things are unreasonable, they're dangerous.
The corporate media tells us this is dangerous, this is unreasonable, it's extreme.
But the people of New York saw through all of that, and all of the slander, and all of the libel, and all of the fear tactics and fear-mongering.
They saw through all of that.
And they said, you know what?
We are not going to support this absolute disgraced creep.
We're going to take a chance on something else.
And what they were taking a chance on was themselves.
This has been a free preview of the weekender edition of the Muckrake Podcast.
If you'd like to hear the rest of this episode and gain access to every weekender every Friday, on top of that, special events, access to our Discord, all kinds of perks, and if you want to support this show and we need it, we absolutely need it, head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
