Zohran Mamdani's New York primary victory sparks a fierce debate between Piers Morgan, Bill de Blasio, and Ron Paul regarding the future of American democracy. While Morgan views Mamdani as a FDR-style revival capable of defeating Trump by addressing affordability, de Blasio warns his socialist platform threatens the American Dream and drives capital away, citing job losses and regulatory hurdles. Ron Paul condemns the spending bill as unconstitutional inflationary printing, arguing it creates a dictatorship of the majority. Ultimately, this clash highlights a deepening ideological rift over wealth redistribution versus entrepreneurship, questioning whether progressive populism can sustain economic stability or if it signals an unsustainable shift toward radical governance. [Automatically generated summary]
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Pure Democracy or Bankruptcy00:11:17
A real-life communist may become mayor of this great city.
He is not fire breathing.
But this effort to paint him as an extremist or someone unreasonable.
I've talked to him many, many times.
And I know an extremist when I see one.
This is not an extremist.
Give me free stuff.
Give me free bus rides.
Give me free subway.
Give me free food.
Don't make me work.
Just like we did in the Soviet Union.
Why has the House minority leader Hakeem Jefferies held back from endorsing him?
If he's this good, why are senior Democrats not piling in?
I think that's a huge mistake.
He won 56% of the vote.
The Statue of Liberty represents the American dream, and now she's dealing with the American nightmare.
President Trump has probably never had a better fortnight across either of his two terms than the White House.
CBS has just agreed to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with him over a 60-minutes interview during the election campaign in which Trump says Carmela Harris was edited to look smarter.
Well, the settlement means we'll never know the full story, but if the aim was to rinse her word seller for political purposes, they certainly did that.
Less contentious of the president's wins on the world stage.
The precision strike on Iran was followed quickly by a ceasefire in a 12-day war that some feared would rage out of control.
NATO hiked defense spending and called him daddy.
Rwanda and the DRC signed a peace deal after decades of fighting, and now the president reckons a ceasefire in Gaza, long overdue, is finally within reach.
Back in DC, the Supreme Court ruled that minor judges can't stand in his way in a huge win for the administration.
And now the big, beautiful bill, probably the biggest legislation of Trump's second presidency, has cleared the Senate.
But you can't, of course, please everybody all the time, not least in politics.
The former first buddy, Elon Musk, is railing against the massive spending bill and says he'll campaign against his supporters, a slight for which Trump says he may be deported.
We might have to put Joej on Elon.
You know what Joe is?
Joe is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.
Wouldn't that be terrible?
He gets a lot of subsidies.
Well, Trump is also facing a backlash from more familiar quarters.
The ascendant left wing of the DNC is in a fighting mood, spurred by the success of socialist Zoran Mandani in New York.
The president says he'll cut off the city's federal funding unless Mamdani behaves, as he put it, assuming that he wins the election to be mayor and assuming he's still there.
We're going to be watching that very carefully.
And a lot of people are saying he's here illegally.
We're going to look at everything.
And ideally, he's going to turn out to be much less than a communist.
But right now, he's a communist.
That's not a socialist.
You know, I've always said we will not have socialism in this country.
And the speech is, I said, well, they skipped socialism.
And you get a lot of them like that.
And you see AOC, she's out there with her, you know, bad IQ.
Well, in a moment, we'll debate that with a progressive two-term mayor of New York, who's backing Mandani, and a millionaire investor who says that he is the American nightmare.
We will begin with a U.S. political legend who spent his life campaigning against U.S. involvement in foreign wars and excessive government spending.
Ron Paul spent more than two decades in Congress and ran three times for president and joins me now.
Mr. Paul, great to have you on Uncensored.
Good.
Good to be with you.
We used to speak a lot in my old CNN days, so it's great to have you here on YouTube.
Let me just read a quote that you said recently.
Government's too big, they print too much money, and they create the problems they pretend that they're fixing.
That was actually, I think, your overview of where we are with this.
So I presume you do not agree with Donald Trump that his bill is a big, beautiful bill.
You presumably think it's the opposite.
Oh, well, it isn't hard.
I did encourage some of the things he was talking about along with Musk at the beginning because they have called attention to some really ridiculous spending like USAID.
But overall, you know, it's once again the same old stuff, promises, promises, but no, no, no serious intent to follow through because that calls out all the special interests.
And that's the nature of our system.
I see that as a consequence of pure democracy.
Democracy means you can gang up on the minority and make the minority pay for all this.
And I think that's what happened.
There's a lot of gangs out there.
It isn't one group wanting to change it and add on to it.
You put them all together.
Then you have the dictatorship of the majority.
And our country's getting poorer by the day.
And we no longer can afford it.
And that's why this is getting more and more difficult.
And even if they come up with another vote, it's not going to last.
And how are they going to pay for it?
They might say, well, it's been suggested that the national debt is going to be increased by $5 trillion.
Well, someday you have to deal with it.
But I think we're already, people used to say, and I would say it too, just passing it on to the kids.
No, the kids of today, they're the ones who are already suffering.
The lower middle income class, they start to pay the bills.
That's the tax, the inflation tax.
So it's the payment is here already, and you don't have to wait.
It's just going to get a lot worse, which is going to incentivize those who want to resort to violence.
Elon Musk was clearly joined at the hip with Trump in the reductive election and for a few months afterwards.
He has come out and attacked this bill in pretty savage fashion.
He thinks it's going to add trillions of dollars to the American debt, which is already in his eyes unsustainable.
It may lead to America going bankrupt.
Trump, in return, says that he believes what it will do is stimulate the economy and that there will be economic growth.
And therefore, all the apocalyptic warnings about the increase to the debt will be overtaken and consumed by the growth.
What do you say to that argument?
Well, it's always, it's been around for a long time.
It never really pays the bills.
It might work here and there when you cut taxes and then they go, there's more people working and there's more tax income.
But overall, it does not solve the problem.
Even the first person to really try this, they got a lot of credit for it.
It wasn't magic, even though it did have a long time to exist.
And that was the Kennedy taxes.
And he says, we'll pay for it.
We're going to stimulate the economy.
And it may work for a month or two or a year, but it's not the answer to the damage done by the spending of money because they never cut spending.
And the deficit, just look at those curves, exponential.
It used to be a slight curve to it.
Now it's a straight line.
And that means that they have no control whatsoever.
All they have is control of more deception because they have to continue to fool the people to go along with this.
And I think the conditions are so bad that eventually it overwhelms.
You know, there were bits and pieces, bits and number of people who resented the COVID epidemic and the ridiculousness of that.
And yet there was just a few, put the doctors in jail and a few others for speaking the truth.
And then eventually more and more people started to realize it.
Now people are realizing a lot of people died because the government became the doctor and they made a lot of mistakes.
And that's the way it is with tax cuts and things like that.
It's tinkering.
It's mismanagement.
It's central economic planning.
And they can talk individual groups into it.
Well, we'll give you this.
So the people who have held out the longest wanted their item.
It might have only been for their state.
And I think that's a result of a misunderstanding of democracy.
You might have a democratic vote to pick a leader, but you don't have pure democracy at 51%.
Says, screw the poor people in the middle class.
Just print the money.
They won't know what's going on.
And then when the prices go up, wage and price controls and we'll blame corporate profits.
You know, the thing goes on and on.
And it's a bipartisan agreement to go after this because neither party right now could do what is the right thing to do, and that is cut spending.
It's not going to happen, but the liquidation of all this malinvestment and all this debt will occur because we're in the middle of it getting started.
And that is debt is being liquidated by paying it off with cheap money.
People say, well, let's get a mortgage now and we'll pay it off discounted money.
And that's what the government, the government likes the inflation because they can just print the money.
And the real debt, in a way, goes down when they do that, but it caused economic chaos, a lot of anger.
I think the biggest threat is the breakout of violence because the wealth distribution becomes so unfair.
And that people should be concerned about.
But they come up with it and say, well, you're right.
Capitalism is terrible.
What you need is socialism.
We'll do a much better job of distributing the wealth.
See, that's the consequence.
And that's coming out of our educational system.
So if we don't reverse that and more people understand the value, the moral and the economic and the value of having a free society and letting people make their own minds, it signs, oh, they say that's daydreaming.
Yes, it's also daydreaming, but it's also the best way if you're looking for peace and prosperity.
President Trump has had a number of political wins in the last two weeks.
That's undeniable, whether people agree with him or not.
He's had wins.
Where do you find agreement with him?
I mean, for example, you don't believe in foreign wars.
Trump doesn't believe in waging foreign wars.
He's pretty well solved the problem of the seemingly unsolvable southern border crisis.
The numbers of people coming in illegally on the southern border have dwindled to almost nothing under Trump in just a few months.
Are these things where you can see common ground with Trump?
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Military Spending and Principles00:04:01
After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them.
So please support our show and tell them I sent you.
Yes, I think so.
And, you know, I have my Liberty Report I do daily.
And Daniel and I that are on the program, we search and we want to come across and say, you know, he did this.
And when he had his programs and he did a few things, we were cheering on.
We still will cheer him on.
But it's sort of very annoying to take what he said and promised.
And then when it comes to doing something about it, it's reversed.
But, you know, George Bush, when he ran for president, I said, boy, maybe he's different.
That's George W. Bush.
He talked about a non-intervention foreign policy.
We're not the policemen of the world and we shouldn't be doing all these things.
But then Dick Cheney took over.
And look at what we had.
More and more wars.
And they're continuing.
And they're all illegal, immoral, and very destructive because these wars should not be fought unless there's a declaration of war.
So everything is unconstitutional as far as I'm concerned.
But if you're not willing to spend the money on the military, that means you're not an American.
You're un-American.
Just look at the few that have stood their ground, what kind of heat they have to take for standing up for what is right.
But let me ask you, I mean, is it actually practical to have a position that America should never get involved in foreign military action?
Because America does still maintain more than 50% of the world's military firepower.
It is still the number one superpower in the world.
That may not be the case in a few years, but it is for now.
And there are lots of fires that have to be put out.
You know, is it really feasible to have a policy that America never gets engaged in foreign invasions?
You don't have to use, never, but not getting engaged is practical.
You know, it would have been practical that we didn't go into Vietnam when I got drafted and my life changed because of that, my medical training and all.
There was nothing practical about having a war that was unconstitutional.
That would be the guideline.
It's easy clear.
That's different.
And then we go and we lose 38,000 Americans.
And if we lost thousands in Korea, what do we do in the Middle East?
It just goes on and on.
They say, oh, no, this will only take a month or two.
Mission accomplished.
And then all of a sudden it's not accomplished.
After 20 years, then they come around and saying we need to get out.
That is what is impractical.
But putting out fires, yes, you know, that is probably going to be around for a while and there will be some interest.
But it shouldn't be done by a dictator.
It shouldn't be done secretly.
It shouldn't be done by militarism and hyping it up that this is what America is all about is coups.
How many coups have we been involved in?
We have overtaken.
Matter of fact, the whole thing in Iran started in 1953.
That's when Eisenhower and the British got together and say, well, this Mossadegh, he's elected, but he's a bum because he wants to keep the oil for the Ukraine or the Iranian.
So they complain about that.
But it's all on and on.
But it was early in our history that we did that.
And we caused a lot of mischief even in the peninsulas here, South American America and Central America.
We've been involved and still they haven't accepted Thomas Jefferson and libertarianism.
They haven't really accepted the principles of our Constitution.
So I would say that is impractical.
Federal Reserve Control Issues00:05:48
What do you think finally is going to happen to the big beautiful bill when it goes to the House of Representatives?
Do you think it's going to get passed there or do you think it's going to need some draconian changes to it?
What do you think is going to happen here?
Something will pass.
You know, if they can't get past by getting it changed because they're running out of time, I think what they'll do is they'll come up with, sorry, folks, we couldn't quite do it, but we're going to give a $30, 30-day reprieve.
We're just going to have a continuing resolution.
So everybody feels like, oh, we're not bankrupt.
They're still sending us money because the printing presses were just, you know, turned on.
So it could be that, a continuum resolution and just limping along, or they could come up with more agreements at the last minute.
But the agreements are always making the thing worse.
Just think, just think how bad the Libertarians thought the House package was.
And then the Republicans and the Senate, they go and make it that much worth in the tune of trillions of dollars.
And they don't even budge when they say, why worry about the national debt going up to $5 trillion more?
They're living in dreamland.
And that's the way it works.
They live from day to day.
And that's the way individuals work.
It's like a credit card.
People run their credit cards up, but boy, if I can get one more credit card, I can get by for another month.
And that's about the way we are.
We're on a credit card.
But the credit card is the Federal Reserve and its effort to print money.
And it is still intact.
And then we have this, to me, a ridiculous debate between Trump and the Federal Reserve on what interest rates should be.
They don't have the vaguest idea what the market rate of interest ought to be to make the economy move smoothly.
So one argues now Trump's on the right side of the Keynesians because when this recession comes, they always lower interest rate.
So I think Trump has a good feel on what's on the books and they won't admit it.
And that's why he's saying lower these interest rates because he doesn't want to be involved in this economy turning down.
But they don't know that.
It's created by the control of interest rates, which is a big deal.
And so what do these people do?
They're price controllers.
They would say, oh, we don't want you in office.
You believe in wage and price controls.
No, but they would believe in control in the money supply.
And that's the inflation rate, the value of the dollar.
And that is huge.
And it's really practically ignored.
I don't think there was many hours debating the nature of good monetary policy in the last couple of weeks.
And finally, Ron Paul, Elon Musk posted on his own social media platform Mexico Monday: if this insane spending bill passes, the America Party will be formed the next day.
Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican Uni Party so that the people actually have a voice.
We're threatening there to start a new party called the America Party.
What do you feel about that?
Well, I don't think much of parties and I don't think much of political solutions.
I think only about people's understanding and prevailing attitudes.
And that means the prevailing attitude today is that governments is to take care of us and it's bipartisan.
It hasn't been the Democrats' fault or the Republicans' fault that we spend all this money, but it's the Democrats and Republicans that voted for all the money.
And they finance all the wars.
They support the Federal Reserve system.
They support all this stuff.
It's bipartisan.
So the only answer is to get a generation of people growing up and saying, why don't we try liberty?
Maybe peace and prosperity can come through liberty, not by electing somebody that makes promises.
And the worse the conditions that the bigger the lies they have to make because it's in a truth, if you tell the truth in an empire of lodge with an empire of lies, if you tell the truth, it's called treason.
And that's why people who stand out now, one, two, three, four, five, you know, bucket and are really telling the truth.
And the people don't want to hear the truth.
And the politicians can't stand it because they're exposed.
And not only do they feel helpless, they're totally embarrassed too.
And then they come up with, well, I'll just get more money for my group and then everybody will be happy.
So they wheel and deal and it's for sale through an auction that goes on by buying and selling in these elections.
And right now, I don't see anything coming of this soon.
I think you'd have to go back 150 years to decide when did we leave the concept of freedom and justice and sound money.
Well, 1971 was a day we really knew what was happening, a day that woke me up to the point where things are going to go downhill and gold was $35 an ounce and now it's $3,300 an ounce because we're going to do it and it's going to be a lot higher than that at the rate we're doing because there's no breaks put on this because politically the people won't accept it.
Ron Paul, brilliant to have you on Uncensored.
Thank you very much.
Good.
Voters Seeking Real Change00:12:59
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Wait a moment, Kevin O'Leary will join the debate.
The first making his uncensored debut as former Democrat mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio.
Mr. Former Mayor, do I call you Mr. Mayor, former mayor?
How do you like to be addressed?
You know, it's all good, Pierre.
You can probably bill.
It's great.
Now, look, I love New York.
I go to New York a lot.
I've lived in New York on and off over the last 20 years.
What do you make of this furore surrounding the, well, as some put it, including Donald Trump, the looming possibility, if not probability, that a real life communist may become mayor of this great city?
Well, first of all, I think people should actually listen to what Zorhan Mondani is saying.
The things he's talking about, I think you, as someone in the UK, would see as social democracy.
You'd see it as very common in many countries of Europe.
He's talking about things like making bus transportation affordable because right now, too many people are struggling in the city and just can't make ends meet.
You know, you love New York.
It's one of the most expensive places on earth.
It is.
So when he talks about free buses, free buses is an idea that is spreading all over the United States to get people onto mass transit, which is already heavily subsidized, as you know.
He's talked about grocery stores.
This has been a fascinating controversy.
People are like, oh, he's going to socialize the groceries.
No, he's not.
What he's saying is we've actually seen supermarkets closing all over New York City.
Their margins are too thin, especially in lower-income and working-class communities.
So he's saying maybe the government can step in and provide a service.
Of course, people will still have to buy food, but at an affordable rate, rather than not having fresh produce and having a supermarket in their neighborhood, which is really not consistent with a civilized country.
I mean, these are very straightforward ideas.
Also, if you listen to him, he's a very intelligent person.
He's a sophisticated person.
He's a reasonable person.
It's not accidental that one parent of his is a noted filmmaker, Mira Naira, and the other a noted academic.
He is not fire-breathing.
He has very strong views.
He's a progressive, unquestionably.
But this effort to paint him as an extremist or someone unreasonable.
I've talked to him many, many times.
And I know an extremist when I see one.
This is not an extremist.
This is a smart, responsible person who happens to have views that are different.
But I'll tell you something, Piers.
This is the earthquake we saw in New York City.
I think we're going to see it all over the country.
The younger generation has spoken here.
The turnout among voters in their 20s and 30s was off the charts.
We've never seen anything like it in terms of it surpassing the voter turnout levels of senior citizens.
I mean, this is unprecedented.
And I think what it says is for Gen Z and for younger millennials, what they're saying is, we can't make ends meet.
We can't buy a house.
We don't feel our incomes are stable.
We can't pay off our loans.
We need something different.
And I think Zorhan fully understood that people sort of gotten to a point of they need to see a different approach and he's offering a different vision and it captured the imagination.
And in many ways, that's a very healthy thing.
What was very interesting, I thought, about the votes that came in for him is that on the one side, you have a lot of people screaming about the fact that he's Muslim.
Notable figures actually saying, have we learned nothing from 9-11?
As if somehow every Muslim in New York is going to commit a terror attack, which clearly is racist in the way they express themselves about him there.
But on the other hand, you had a lot of young Jewish people in New York City, which has more Jews living in it than any city outside of Tel Aviv in the world, queuing up racing to vote for a Muslim candidate.
I found that pretty extraordinary, but very telling.
What do they say to you?
It's such a powerful point.
I mean, look, the fact is he did get a very strong Jewish vote.
And if you know the Jewish community, and I was honored to serve as mayor for eight years of that city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, what you know is it's an extremely diverse community.
A lot of people in the Jewish community responded to his message.
Other people are worried, and I understand their worry, but I don't think they've heard the whole message.
I don't think they've gotten to know him as a person.
If you look at the second debate, which was decisive, which is really when I think Zorhan took off and Cuomo really started to fade, I thought Zorhan's statements about protecting the Jewish community in New York, doing his job as mayor by making sure that community is safe, fighting anti-Semitism, and fighting Islamophobia at the same time.
I thought they were heartfelt and intense.
I'm someone who believes in the state of Israel.
I believe there's a need for a Jewish state.
I know plenty of Jewish people who have a different vision, closer to Zorhan's, which is a multicultural democracy in Israel.
Those are legitimate questions.
That's a legitimate conversation.
But I think it's been unfortunately a bad trend lately when there's a policy difference, maybe a different vision of what peace will be in the Middle East or a different vision of whether the Netanyahu government is doing right or wrong in Gaza.
Some people turn that into something deeper and throw the phrase anti-Semitism very lightly.
It should not be thrown lightly.
That is a profoundly troubling reality and you should only put that label to someone who truly has earned it.
It's not fair to say it about Zorhan and many other people.
And when we're going to fight anti-Semitism, we need to really identify the true anti-Semites of all different ideologies.
But here, I think what happened was people voted locally.
It's funny, Andrew Cuomo, I think, thought the election could be about the Middle East.
He disproportionately focused on that question, hoping, I think, that he could turn out a massive Jewish vote.
But it doesn't matter if someone's Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, they're voting locally.
The famous Tip O'Neill quote that kind of defines America, all politics is local.
Well, Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson, who you would never imagine would say anything complimentary about a guy like Zahra Mandani, he came out and said, you know what?
He was the only candidate actually talking about New York City.
And it was probably that which propelled him to win the primary, because actually he was engaged in exactly what you just said.
And he wasn't taking a kind of global posturing position at all.
You know, I don't often agree with Tucker, but I think he's got the right point here.
And I'll tell you something.
It was a fascinating moment in that second debate where they said, classic New York City question, which nation will you visit first as mayor?
And this is, you know, we are the most diverse, ethnically diverse place on earth, the city of immigrants.
People are very close to their homelands.
It is natural for New York City mayors to go overseas.
And each candidate talked about where they go.
And then it got to Zorhan Mandani, and he said, I'm going to stay right here in New York.
I'm going to focus on the neighborhoods.
And that is the essence of why he won.
He was ubiquitous.
He was with people.
Every time you saw him, all those videos he created, they were great videos, but more important than the quality of the video was he was in neighborhoods with people.
You know, on the last 48 hours before the election, he walked the length of Manhattan from one tip to the other and just connected with people.
And meanwhile, Cuomo was his leading, Andrew Cuomo was his leading competitor, rarely would be seen in anything but a very formal set-piece event and only a few each day.
That contrast, there's so many layers here, Piers, but one of them that's most profound is people are hurting.
It's all about affordability at this point in New York City.
And they wanted to know that the mayor felt it, understood it, could connect with them.
And the guy who did it, sure, he's 33.
Sure, he's Muslim.
Sure, he's a Democratic socialist.
People, many ways, didn't care about any of that.
They wanted to know who understood them and actually might do something about their challenges.
When he talked about, you know, black and white neighborhoods and what he might do one comparative to the other, was he being naive there?
Did he do anything wrong?
Should he have phrased it differently?
Or was he simply actually calling out the reality?
You know, having just listened to Ron Paul on your show, I was impressed by the refreshing truth-telling.
And I think it crosses the ideological spectrum.
I think we're in the age of authenticity.
To many voters and just everyday people, it is much less about your specific ideology and much more about are you speaking from the heart?
Are you calling it as you see it?
This is bluntly part of why Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024.
And I didn't agree, didn't agree with him.
I don't think his message was necessarily sincere, but people heard him willing to say whatever came to mind.
And he is authentic.
I mean, I've known Trump a long time.
He says what he thinks in the moment.
Now, what he thinks may change from day to day, but there is a real unvarnished authenticity about him.
And in a way, Mandani does remind me a bit of Trump, but on the progressive left side.
And it may be he's exactly what they've needed.
Of course, the big question becomes, you know, if this, as you say, has a ripple effect across America, can a progressive left Democrat national candidate actually beat, say for argument's sake, another MAGA candidate, say it's JD Vance or whoever it may be in the next election.
Could a progressive left Democrat candidate actually win?
Because that, I think, is a bigger question for the Democrats on the national stage.
I think based on the evidence we've seen in 2016 and 2020 in the Democratic primaries, in both instances, Bernie Sanders came quite close to winning the nomination, especially 2020.
And what was fascinating, Piers, was how many people who ultimately became Trump voters were attracted to Bernie Sanders' message.
He was an outsider.
He was speaking authentically.
No one doubts that about Bernie.
And he was going, everything was economics.
Everything was kitchen table issues, health care, wages, really core things that people could relate to.
By the way, that is what the 2024 election was all about.
It was all about economics.
Donald Trump understood that a lot better than Kamala Harris.
Well, Zorhan understood that lesson so deeply in New York.
And the combination of the authenticity, the ubiquitousness, the focus, the relentless focus on economic issues, that could work for a national Democrat and actually could peel off some of those Trump Democrats.
You know, the fascinating thing, you know America well, a fascinating reality, five elections, and there are a number of counties in America that did this.
They did Obama, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump.
This is a fascinating phenomenon.
Individual voters, but also counties that are crucial counties in swing states.
That pattern over five elections.
What does that tell you?
It tells you that those voters could go either way.
And what they're looking for is someone who gets what they're going through and is going to do something about it.
I think this model could be persuasive on a national level, but only if the person who is the nominee is willing to be that unvarnished, speak from the heart, tell it like it is person, and sometimes say things that are not popular.
To your earlier point, sometimes Zorhan says something that no political consultant would ever approve of.
But the public hears it as, you know what, he's willing to say the thing he actually thinks, and we may not even have to agree with it, but we don't think he's editing himself or spinning us.
Capital Levels and Costs00:15:40
We think he's actually talking with us.
Okay, well, joining us now to probably not agree with everything you've just said is the chairman of O'Leary Ventures and Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary.
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So Kevin, I know you've just joined us.
You may have missed some of the eulogy we heard there from former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to Zaram Mandani.
But in a nutshell, this is the great hope that New York has been waiting for.
The young in particular are energized by this dynamic young Muslim.
He's not a communist.
He's just a guy who cares about New York and he's going to make their lives better with free buses and the rest of his agenda.
Your thoughts?
Well, I did hear his comments and I respect them, but I of course don't agree with them at all.
There's a reason that these young people in New York are despondent and looking for relief.
New York is in economic collapse because of policies like these that were put in previously and now even accelerated or magnified with what he's proposing.
The problem New York has, just pragmatically speaking, what this mayor has, is the states, this is put in place by the founding fathers, compete with each other for capital and ideas and tax rates and policy.
And New York is at the bottom of the barrel on all of those.
And so quietly, wealthy people who pay all the taxes are leaving New York and going to states like Tennessee, Florida, Texas.
They still keep their residences in New York, but they only live there six months less a day by the billions of dollars, billions, billions of dollars.
And then developers like me, I'm just one, when we choose to put work or money to work, sovereign wealth funds, we quietly fly over New York.
New York should be competing right now in AI because it has low-cost power behind Niagara Falls.
But quietly, we don't put money there because of policy like this and politicians like this, because we can do it with much less risk in North Dakota, West Virginia, Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Texas, you name it.
So quietly, all this money by the billions is leaving.
And so the only thing you can do to people who can't find meaningful jobs with politicians like him and AOC and all the rest of it is say, give me free stuff.
Give me free bus rides.
Give me free subway.
Give me free food.
Don't make me work.
Just like we did in the Soviet Union and in North Korea.
Well, we know how that ends very, very badly.
And I think that's going to happen in New York, a slow decay of economic wealth.
Okay, Bill de Blasio, apparently we're heading towards North Korea if this progressive socialist gets into power.
I am not going to start learning Korean.
Sorry, Piers.
It's not coming our way.
Here's the deal.
Since the pandemic, you'll remember we were the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.
Right before the pandemic, I'm proud to say as mayor, we got to our highest job total ever in our history, 4.5 million jobs.
Well, we lost some jobs because of the pandemic, and guess what?
They have come back and then some.
So I'm sorry that the facts are different than my colleague is saying.
The fact is New York City is booming.
We are producing new millionaires all the time.
Now, I agree.
I think in the spirit of Zorhan, it's good to be truth-telling.
Yeah, some people have left for Florida.
That is a true statement.
And some of that is philosophical for sure.
But our economy is strong enough and our history is being a center of entrepreneurship and creativity and unparalleled energy.
If you're active in the global economy, you have to be in New York.
That is a reality.
And that's how businesses comport themselves.
So I disagree that policies that would be common in Western Europe to make transportation affordable, to make sure people have supermarkets in their neighborhoods, we're only talking about trying to make sure basic human needs are met.
That actually makes for a stronger city and a more sustainable city.
We are the global capital of capitalism.
That's not changing.
But we have to be a place that people can afford.
Way, I talk to young professionals all the time.
You know, I did free early childhood education, pre-K for all.
And I talk to young professionals who say if it were not for that benefit, they would not be able to stay in New York and contribute to our economy and our growth.
So people in the most expensive city in America, they do need some special supports.
But what do they give back for those supports?
They help us create an incredibly vibrant economy.
Where are you going to find a single city with over 4.5 million jobs anyplace else?
And so I just think this sky is falling mentality.
We've heard it.
We heard it after 9-11.
We heard it after the recession.
We heard it as COVID hit that New York City was going to be over.
And, you know, what are we going to do?
But guess what?
Property, look at rents.
Look at property values higher than ever.
Doesn't that say something about how much people want to be here?
Okay, Kevin.
So, Kevin, you're a doommonger painting an apocalyptic picture, which many people have done over the years.
It never materializes.
No, no, no.
I'm not a doommonger.
I'm just dealing with facts.
What's the highest tax rate you can possibly get in the United States of America?
New York City.
Where is the lowest value for your taxes?
New York City.
And in terms of being the only place on earth where capital is flowing to, au contraire, Mozamis, let's go to Abu Dhabi.
Let's go to Doha.
Let's go to London, England.
Let's go to Switzerland and Zurich with all the competition's occurring.
New York is not the only place you can put money to work.
And look, I love New York City.
I have family there.
I choose not to live there.
I choose not to pay taxes there.
I choose to see the Rockettes.
And just think about what this means when people sail up the Hudson years and years, decades ago, to be free from abuse of taxation, only to find her there in the most heavily taxed, most difficult policy, most anti-business environment in the United States.
That is not the American dream.
The Statue of Liberty represents the American dream, and now she's dealing with the American nightmare in terms of policy.
I am not the only person that feels this way.
I am not a doommonger, but I'm saying watch out, New York.
There's plenty of competition domestically in states like Texas and Florida and internationally as we digitize the economy.
I would be very concerned if I were in New York City watching this kind of policy.
I have no qualm about the success this politician's had.
He's played it perfectly, but there is a cost to bad policy.
I'm not, I don't make money with politicians.
I don't care.
They come and go.
This guy's going to be gone soon, too.
But the slow erosion of the competitiveness of New York State and New York City is evident to capital from all around the world.
And I'm just one voice pointing it out.
I don't see doom.
I'm going back to New York next week.
I love it.
I'll make damn sure I'm not there six months in a day.
Kevin, just quickly, on the question of the fact that he's a Muslim, it does seem to have brought out the worst in certain people, talking about 9-11 and all this kind of thing.
And yet, as I was talking to Bill earlier, it was very striking that in the stampede of young people who raced to vote for Mandani, many of them were young Jewish people.
So they clearly didn't have any problem with him being a Muslim.
What do you make of the attention around his religion?
Listen, I believe everybody.
One of the reasons America is so successful is we allow every religion.
You can pray to any God you wish, and that's so valuable.
You only realize how much you want that when you go to a place where you can't do it.
But I don't, look, he can be any religion he wants.
It's his policy I care about.
And I have lots of Muslim friends and lots of Muslims working for me.
I respect that religion.
I really do, as I do the Jewish religion, as I do the Catholic religion of which I'm a member, Irish Catholic.
It doesn't get any tougher than that.
And so, you know, to me, that is not what we're talking about here.
It may have some resonance in terms of people's concern, or if there's some way don't like him because of it, that's just wrong.
That's un-American.
But the policy is not right.
And so I would, you know, I'm probably going to have to deal with this mayor at some point.
I will tell him how I feel about his policies and why he should think about them a little bit more.
Because I like to bring the generalist view, the competitive view.
I invest all around the world and I represent economies everywhere.
You know, and I think that's important.
I do not want to see the city where my daughter lives turn into, I don't know, Los Angeles.
That's a pretty bad place.
That's another example of bad policy.
All right, Bill?
Yeah, first of all, the folks who came up the Hudson River long ago were seeking religious freedom, not freedom from taxation.
And I want to say, picking up, and I thought Kevin was very heartfelt, and I agree with him, on the beauty of a society, the necessity of a society that allows for all religions and beliefs.
New York City is the exemplar of that, which is why we have attracted the greatest talent from all over the world.
And this is the X factor.
I'm not saying there aren't other places to invest.
I understand that.
But what we have that is absolutely beyond compare, the greatest pool of talent, certainly anywhere in the country, I would say anywhere in the world, because people are attracted to the culture, to the vibrancy, to the entrepreneurship, to the creativity, and that has not changed one iota, regardless of every crisis.
In fact, COVID, great example.
We faced an incredible crisis.
The city came together.
We showed our strength and resiliency.
It made people believe in us more.
Point one, point two, Kevin, with all due respect, the value proposition when you pay your taxes in New York City, the finest police force on earth, the finest firefighters on earth, the finest health department on earth, when you saw how the health apparatus of this city fought back against COVID, and we went from epicenter to a place that was highly vaccinated and one of health-wise, one of the safest places in the country in less than a year.
The capacity of the public service of New York City to serve people is extraordinary, unparalleled.
Yes, it costs money, there's no doubt, but the product is there.
I will guarantee you what the NYPD does every day, worth its weight in gold, worth every tax dollar it does.
Bill, Bill, let me ask you.
So I think I'm going to make a point.
If Matt Dani is the great hope now for the Democrats and he's going to transform New York and so on, why has the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries held back from endorsing him?
If he's this good, why are senior Democrats not piling in?
Yeah, I think that's a huge mistake.
I have a lot of respect for Hakeem Jeffries.
I know him well.
I think it's a mistake.
Because here we have someone, now the full count of the primary is in.
He won 56% of the vote against a former governor, 100% known to the people of this city, obviously someone with many scandals too.
But the point is there was intense competition.
And Mamdani won 56% of the vote in the Democratic primary in a city that is six to one Democratic registration.
So I think it's time for Democratic leaders to recognize not only did he win fair and square, he's saying the things that people care about and he's not saying them insincerely.
He's saying them from the heart.
It's all about affordability.
If Democrats in 2024 had run a campaign closer to Mamdani's campaign, we could have beaten Donald Trump.
It's as simple as that.
would have the House of Representatives right now if we spoke as relentlessly about the cost of living and what we were going to do about it.
And if we were out with the people and connected to the people, not fancy concerts with celebrities, but actually connecting to the people.
So I think all Democrats should recognize here's someone who has actually shown us what our roots are.
This is the Democratic Party of FDR and Truman and Kennedy and Johnson coming to life again in this time.
And that is the party that had the big tank coalition, that had working people of all different ethnicities.
I think Zorhan has actually done a favor to the mainstream Democratic Party to remind us what actually works and what people actually care about.
Kevin?
No, I don't agree.
I think he's far too extreme to get a platform that could compete with the Republicans.
And I'm very concerned about this.
I think democracy works when both parties are strong and bring middle to the center ideas forward.
That's how you win the presidency.
And I don't think getting this far stretched in any direction, in this case, claims of communism and socialism and redistribution of wealth, you know, these are not platforms that are going to work everywhere in America because this is not what the American Dream is about.
The American Dream is the number one export of America.
It's not energy or technology.
People come here for religious freedom, for the ability to support their families, to be entrepreneurial.
I mean, that's what it's all about.
And some of the messaging he's putting out doesn't fit with that.
And, you know, to the former mayor, I would say I totally agree with him.
NYPD is one of the finest forces on earth.
And the way they deal with it, same with the state troopers.
I support them too.
And why?
Because in order to have entrepreneurship, in order to start a 1,200 square foot hardware store, you need the police.
Those are my people.
I support American entrepreneurship.
Five to 500 employee companies is my base.
I support them.
That's what I do in every state.
Job creation and law is bipartisan.
You can't have a business operating without good security, good police work at the street level, at the state level, at the municipal level, everywhere.
And New York has the finest.
There's no question about it.
But the policy itself, you can't tell me it can't be improved.
New York should remain the number one epicenter of capital on earth.
But it won't be with these policies because there's too much competition that is much easier to work with, particularly on permitting for real estate or permitting for AI or data centers or some of these new technologies.
I am evidence of that.
I'm just one of these people doing it all over the world.
And I'm telling you, New York is not open for business in this very important area.
Disorder vs Safety Policies00:03:44
And I'm one of the only people willing to speak out about it because I want New York to be fixed.
I want it to win, but not with this kind of policy.
Bill de Blasio, before I-Piers, Piers, very quickly, what I heard.
I heard Kevin, I heard Kevin say, and I think I interpreted it right, he's going to come back to New York.
He's going to stay more than half a year and pay those taxes so we can have that best police force in the country.
I think Kevin just had a conversion experience here on the Piers Morgan show.
It happens to the best of us.
It happens to the best of the House and Bill de Blasio.
I can work with this guy.
I love him.
Of course.
I did not say that.
I was going to ask you, Bill.
I was going to ask you, Bill, just finally.
I mean, you were mayor of New York for eight years, a long time, running one of the great cities of the world.
What was your biggest regret?
When you finish, when you look back, what's the thing you wished you'd been able to achieve you didn't achieve?
You know, it comes from something that Bill Bratton said to me.
And Bill Bratton was my first police commissioner.
I did an extraordinary job.
I'm very proud to say we drove down crime for six years in a row before the pandemic to levels we hadn't seen literally since the 1950s in New York.
Bill Bratton said to me, and I think all public servants should understand this, there is crime itself and then there's disorder.
And people are worried about both.
You can bring down crime, but if there's an atmosphere of disorder, that's still problematic to how people feel in their everyday lives.
Just everyday people, working class people, middle class people.
On the issue of homelessness, I did not understand some of the things we needed to do to turn that around.
We did figure it out after several years.
We started to put better policies in place to reduce street homelessness.
But I did not understand well enough both some of the policies that we could use, but also how people were receiving that as a feeling of disorder, even while we were making them safer in general.
You know, much less violence, thank God, less shootings, fewer murders, et cetera.
But if they saw something on the street that was unsettling, it was almost the equivalent.
Now I understand that.
I'm certainly going to counsel when this election is over and a new mayor is chosen.
I'm going to counsel that that feeling and that need to address both violence and concerns about disorder have to be front and center.
Well said.
Bill de Basio, great to have you on a census.
Kevin, great to have you back on our sensitive.
I really enjoyed that debate.
Kevin, you always conduct your debates in such a civilized manner.
I wish all my guests were like you.
Can I just add one comment?
You want me to help solve the homelessness problem at affordable rates?
You can't put rent control there.
I would love to get a permit to build in New York.
Nobody can.
And they're certainly not going to do it with rent control proposed by this new mayor.
That's policy.
That's the problem right there, Mr. Mayor.
Deal with that.
Very quick response.
Very quick response.
Kevin, come to New York City, join us, buy me dinner, and we'll have this discussion.
I love that.
Well, the good news is I can still afford it, and I'll do that.
I'd love to talk to you.
I want a piece of this dinner.
Guys, thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Take care.
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