Transcription
I'm freezing. You're wrecked. That's the next fairy in New York City. Let's plunge into the details.
The name is Mam Dani. M A M D A N I. You should learn how to say it.
I just want to speak directly to the president. I will be a mayor who is ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living.
They've got all the money in the world. We've got you. This is not the kind of story, a mayoral election, even in a city as prominent as New York that we at the listening post would typically focus on. However, the rise of Zoron Mdani, who was expected to win on November 4th has been unusually revealing, unexpectedly informative. Mani calls himself a democratic socialist here in a city that is as corporate and as capitalistic as they come. You are a self-described democratic socialist. Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?
New York is home to Wall Street and the political donor class, the financial power brokers who will spend big to take down a socialist.
He is more than just the typical woke Marxist that focus on identity politics, DEI. He is a fullfledged communist.
And they have plenty of allies on the airwaves. This city is also the media capital of the United States, the place where dominant economic, political, and social narratives are formed that tend to protect the status quo. One of the most newsworthy aspects of Zoran Mandani's candidacy, it turns out, has been his background. He is not just an immigrant. He is a Muslim, and he has pulled few punches in his criticism of Israel and its 2-year-old genocide in Gaza. here in a city that has more Jews in it than Jerusalem does. On the eve of the election and with the advanced voting well underway, what happens here in New York could echo far beyond the city itself.
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Ask any New Yorker, when did they first hear the name Zoron Madani? What was the first time this candidate for the mayor's office showed up on their social media feeds?
Can you tell me a little bit more about why you didn't vote?
They will probably take you back to 2024, shortly after another election, the one that returned Donald Trump to the White House.
Zeramani first went viral with a video in which he did man on the street interviews in New York. So, here were a bunch of voters in a state that's more typically liberal talking about why they didn't vote for Kla Harris and why they did vote for Donald Trump. It was a pretty simple concept, but Mambdan's energy and curiosity I think really broke through.
And that's your hope to see a little bit more of an affordable life.
Absolutely. Here they are being interviewed by someone who is brown, who is Muslim, who would be typically perceived to be the subject of negativity and eyeire from this very population, having a really warm, open exchange of ideas. And I think it opened up the possibility that these are voters that could come back into the Democratic party fold. There are more Democrats that need to get outside of the safe spaces and they need to get comfortable in having long and freewheeling conversations with voters. They need to be accessible and out amongst the public.
How's it going, New York City?
And I think we need to have frank conversations with people about where we agree with them and where we disagree. Those candidates who are in the end willing to face a whole bunch of different types of voters, interviews, and outlets are at least better positioned to make their case to the widest number of people. And you had this young 33year-old seemingly who couldn't win the election but was saying the things that really stirred emotions in New Yorkers and in voters.
I'll make buses fast and free so I can just get where I'm going.
And I think people started to pay attention and say, well, you know, why why can't he win?
And with the polls consistently showing mom Donnie out in front, his chances of winning are looking good. What I don't have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what you don't have in integrity, you could never make up for in experience.
He has a double-digit lead over his main rival, Andrew Cuomo, the former state governor and longtime Democrat, who after Mumani trounced him in the primary, is running as an independent candidate. Cuomo's name has been stained since 2021 when as governor he was investigated by the US Justice Department for his handling of the CO 19 pandemic before he was forced to resign following multiple accusations of sexual harassment. Despite that history, Cuomo still has big money backing him. And he enjoys the tacid support of the Democratic Party's centrist establishment, most of which has repeatedly refused to endorse Mumani Cuomo's other allies in this race, much of the mainstream media.
I'd love to know what your mom says about your run for office.
Well, as you know, I'm I'm a mama's boy to begin with. Cuomo's various sexual harassment claims, which have been well documented, are wellknown. They're not considered that controversial. They're kind of barely brought up. They're brought up around the margins. They're not really considered that important. What's controversial is what the media tells you is controversial.
The mainstream media, whether it's right-leaning or left-leaning, liberal or Republican, are largely funded by the same people. And as a consequence, you get very similar sorts of media products. They're all for US imperialism. They're all going to be in support of Israel and they're all going to be broadly opposed to any kind of populist economic policy that prioritizes the interests of poor and working people.
When you say freezed rents, free bus rides, high taxes on millionaires, free child care, city-owned grocery stores. I mean, I've been to city- owned grocery stores in Havana, Cuba. You don't want to go to those. And that's how you get a media that treats Zoromani talking about free buses and uh controlling the prices of rent in New York, treated as more of a threat than someone like Andrew Cuomo, who had to literally resign as governor of New York over a series of sexual harassment scandals and a scandal over his mismanagement of COVID that resulted in the deaths of a large number of senior New Yorkers. The Democratic Party has a habit that goes way back of rejecting leftist candidates like Zoran Mdani.
Zoran Mani and every other democ other Democratic socialist should create their own party cuz I don't want that in my party.
My problem is that he's a socialist and and he should be in the socialist party not the Democratic party. The party claims to stand for the working class, but keeps sidelining potential leaders whose politics resonate with that side of the electorate, figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And it has pressured others like Alexandria Okasiocortez to adopt some of the party's more mainstream policies. So the platform Zoron Mdani is running on was never going to go down well with the Democratic party establishment. On housing, Mdani is promising to freeze rental prices on all rent subsidized apartments effective immediately. On transport, he is promising free bus transit for everyone. He says he will provide families with free child care, which currently costs New Yorkers about $25,000 a year per child. and Mandani is proposing to pay for those things primarily by taxing the rich, raising corporate taxes, and by cracking down on things like tax avoidance. Such policies are anthma to Wall Street and to most of the Democratic Party's leaders, so-called centrist Democrats, but they are clearly landing with voters more concerned with the rising cost of living than they are with a label like Socialist.
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Strategic organizations aligned with the Democrats are equally uncomfortable with what they are seeing in New York. Organizations like Third Way. To them, socialism is a dirty word. And campaigns like Mum Donny's funded mostly through small donations from middle class voters rather than billionaire backers, as Third Way puts it, may not align with the broader electorate. The group argues Mum Donnie would take the party in the wrong direction. and it wants him to sever his ties to the democratic socialists of America to denounce it as a toxic platform. Kate de Groder is Third Way's senior director of communications. Mumdani is one of those new faces um that has emerged on the scene. But there's a lot of anxiety and fear that embracing somebody from the farthest left wing of a party that the right is going to seize on this opportunity to lift him up as the future of the Democratic party and to use him as a weapon against some of the candidates that we need to win to put a check on Trump. And if he is elected mayor and becomes a nationally recognized leader of this party, he could do real damage to other Democrats, not just in New York State, but across the country. I absolutely believe that Democrats need to offer an alternative to Trump and MAGA. I don't think that it is necessarily true that the best way that we can do that is by embracing democratic socialism. This idea that somehow self-describing as a democratic socialist or self-describing as a progressive is somehow politically toxic has no empirical basis. There's this assumption that there's this far-left far-right kind of gradient with two polls and the candidate who gets just dead in the center is going to somehow by definition appeal to more. This ignores factors like authenticity and it ignores a key factor which is something we see more and more coming up in our politics which is this idea of establishment versus not being part of the establishment. And this is an attack on our democracy.
And Mandani represents and has the vibe of an of an anti-establishment candidate.
Zoron Mdani is 34. His ethnicity is Indian. His father is an academic, his mother a filmmaker. Mdani was actually born in Uganda and moved to the US at age 7. But more importantly in terms of this race, he is a digital native. Mdani used to dabble in rap. His music videos went viral long before his campaign ads did. Other politicians would kill for the engagement he gets online, like the 6 million views his video from a Wuang Clan concert at Madison Square Garden got the legions of followers spreading the word. And Mandani has a way of connecting with Americans, explaining complex issues through simple things like food, as a way of getting at the crisis of affordability. New York is suffering from a crisis and it's called halal flation. 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.
Social media paved his way to the primary win and also provided an easy path for individual donors as opposed to billionaires to fund his campaign. But the mainstream side of it has been a different ballgame. New York is home to financial news channels CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business that spend far more time looking at the stock market than affordability issues.
Now, of course, Madam wants to jack up taxes on successful earners and businesses. Pure insanity.
Not that all the corporate coverage of Mom Donnie has been hostile. More and more profile pieces such as those coming out of the New York Times magazine, Vanity Fair, and Time magazine, while challenging some of his positions, have at least provided Mam Donnie with a fair platform. But overall, they remain the exception. Rupert Murdoch's US holdings like the New York Post and Wall Street Journal have hammered Mumani. And the Washington Post, the personal property of mega billionaire Jeff Bezos, warned that a Mandani win would be bad for New York.
In every campaign, there is a struggle between what reporters want to talk about and what voters want to hear about. Reporters want sensational headlines. They want attacks back and forth and fights between candidates. They're looking to create the sizzle. Zoron was a communist. He was a socialist. He's anti-semitic.
Calling him a communist is not far off base.
He's a socialist. He has a long history of anti-semitism. Socialist. He's a self-avowed socialist.
But voters are much less focused on headlines. They're much more focused on what's happening in their daily lives.
Housing is a human right. People are so frustrated with the system, with how much it costs to live in our city and our country and how hard it is to get by that they are willing to vote for people who are going to fight against that system. The thing is in the United States, you can always rely on both liberal and conservative media to punch left at all times and to lobby bad faith attacks that characterize any moderate social democratic kind of policy as something to be feared. And at the same time, they ignore all of the very real problems and the deaths and the horrors that happen under our unfettered capitalist system. And I think that Zoramani is very good at neutralizing that fear-mongering by talking very concretely about what are very basic social programs.
This is a stain on our city to see this many children in our public school system be homeless. And that's why my campaign is going to deliver 200,000 new affordable homes across the five burrows. He's very very good at studying and anticipating the bad faith claims that he's going to be hit with and speaking in very concrete and pretty measured terms about what he actually wants to provide to New York City.
One story line persistently used to put Zoron Mdani on the spot has been his relationship with New York's Jewish voters and his position on Israel, the occupation, and the genocide in Gaza. It started long before September when he vowed to act on the International Criminal Court's indictment of the Israeli Prime Minister should he ever set foot in New York.
And Mayor Mumani, would he welcome uh Prime Minister Netanyahu to New York City? As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. Back in June, a political organization called Sensible City started spending money on ads implying that Mamani's position on Gaza represented a threat to Jewish New Yorkers.
It's not safe. Institution walls defaced with symbols to remind us of what can happen only because of who we are.
Sensible city's biggest donor, Rob Stavis, has strong ties to the pro-Israel lobby. As for Cuomo, initially he was careful not to accuse Mumdonni of anti-semitism. That changed just before the early voting began.
There is no New Yorker without the Jewish community. Here came the day who runs based on his anti-semitic stance.
And it escalated. In the final week of his campaign and still polling badly, Cuomo dialed it up, invoking 911 and leaning heavily into anti-Muslim bigotry.
God forbid another 9/11. Can you imagine Mandami in the seat?
Yeah, I could. He He'd be cheering.
There's another problem.
Uh, but can you imagine that? Months previously, Mdani's critics zeroed in on this moment from a podcast he appeared on.
Sure. Like, does that just make you uncomfortable? Like the phrase globaliz from the river to the sea.
Am less comfortable with the idea of banning the use of certain words and that I think it is more evocative of a Trump style approach. Mainstream broadcasters then seized on that, took it a giant step further and repeatedly confronted Mdani over whether he would condemn a phrase that he had never said, globalize the inif, which in Arabic translates to globalized the uprising.
Do you condemn that phrase, globalize the inifat, which a lot of people hear as a call to violence against Jews? quickly for the people who care about the language and who feel really concerned by that phrase. Why not just condemn it?
A fresh test of mom Donnie's credibility had been devised out of nothing by talking heads, some of whom did not even know what they were talking about. I I was also just separately a couple things disturbed by the global uh uh globalized uh the what what do you say that just just just made me crazy over the weekend.
I cannot think of another politician where they're repeatedly told to condemn something that they never said. That is a new standard that they invented almost overnight from Mum Dani. Again, 99% of politicians if they got asked about globalizing over and over again for months on end would have just said, "I'd condemn it." That's what a weaker politician would have done. He's not condemning it. Right?
That's not language that I use.
And this whole globalizing dust up is at its core bad faith. This is a totally one-way empathy. Palestinians, Arabs, Yemeni, Syrians, all the different people who Israel bombs all the time, however, who whomever they may be, are not afforded this constant prominence, this this pride of place in the in the empathy Olympics.
I think it is fair and appropriate for all Americans to be investigating and asking candidates for office what they are going to do to keep them safe and to make sure that they have a sense of belonging. There are a lot of Americans who were deeply anxious by the way that Mdani handled those questions. And I think at a moment when there is rising anti-semitism across the country, that is an important and um credible conversation for voters to have. the flash.
What Sauron Mdani is up against, what any critic of Israel has to contend with in the US political realm is a hybrid of ideological and corporate influencers who often end up intersecting on the airwaves. It starts with Apac, the pro-Zionist lobby group that funds so many American politicians and seems to have them on speed dial. The Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, has a similar relationship with corporate news outlets who always appear to keep a studio seat warm for the ADL's leader, Jonathan Greenblat, who's also out to get Mom Donnie.
Why won't he condemn globalizing cuz he believes it? I mean, I think we have to take people at their word. Even media outlets in Israel have occasionally paused their incitement of the genocide in Gaza for long enough to raise the alarm over what is happening in New York.
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And while mom Donnie continues to hold a comfortable lead in the polls, he did finally backpedal over the globalized the inifat thing, albeit to an interviewer on MSNBC who could not even pronounce the phrase. The term globalized the infot inifata is become a flash point for Jewish New Yorkers. Has your personal views on the phrase of of global infittata changed by the since you've been running for mayor? Yes, they have. But this is language I would discourage.
It's pretty clear that Zorumani's corporate opponents thought that hitting him on Israel was going to be a winning ticket. You saw folks like Jonathan Greenblat of the ADL, Bill Aman and others really putting a lot of money behind the message that Zoron was this scary Muslim brown other. There were ads in which they darkened his skin and lengthened his beard. And they thought that New York being the largest population of Jewish folks outside of Israel would turn on him on this point. And it didn't work. And in fact, Iran's commitment to defending the rights of Palestinians and imposing the genocide in Gaza actually galvanized a lot of support behind them. So the question now is what is the point of moderating? Why backtrack on the issue of Gaza? Does that gain you any new followers? Does that give you any new support? Does it actually assuage the concerns of your antagonists? Or does it just feed into the bad faith attacks without winning you anything in return?
There are aspects of this mayoral race in New York that make it look like a microcosmic version of Donald Trump's election victory last year in that it spotlights once again the declining importance of the mainstream media in American politics and the ever growing influence of social media where Zoron Mandani has been the biggest influencer of them all. And while the affordability issue has been at the core of his campaign, the genocide in Gaza, Mani's calling out of the Israelis for inflicting it on Palestinians and of the Trump administration for its complicity in it have been central as well. And that is one of the things that those centrist Democrats fear the most. That Zoron Mdani is not an outlier. That the apparent success of his campaign reflects the changing tide in American society on that issue. And that he will drag other candidates like him into the fight. That if he wins, and the polls suggest that he will, the Money effect will not just be felt here in New York.
for people in power who want to hold on to their power, who don't want to see grassroots movements empower a new generation of leaders who don't want to see change in the Democratic party and they will bear the brunt of the blame for that amongst these young voters. They will then continue to shut out this generation of young progressives who are an important part of the future of the party. I think it will be much more difficult for the party as a whole to be successful in 2026 and beyond if this fracture continues.
There are going to be some who suggest that we should be running Mandani style candidates across the country in order to take back power.
I think that that is profoundly dangerous. We need to be very cautious about the conclusions we draw from this campaign about what the path back to power is going to look like for Democrats nationally. suggesting that the model is to embrace uh a candidate and an agenda that is further to the left really clangs with the the challenge and the stakes of how Democrats stop Trump and MAGA and build a durable coalition that can help us hold power and start to rebuild our country. To a great extent, the attacks on Mum Donnie, they're less about Mum Donnie than they are about the 10 M Dani wannabes behind him because they fear that you show that you can win as a principled progressive, someone who opposes landlords and real estate interests.
We are an existential threat to billionaires who think their money can buy our democracy, who supports Palestinian rights. My belief in a universality and international law is also the same set of beliefs that have led me to describe what's happening in Gaza as a genocide.
You can win in spite of all the money and interest, in spite of the pressure to support genocide. And that sends a message to people who want to run in Raleigh, North Carolina or Los Angeles, California or San Antonio, Texas. It's controversial to the establishment. They want these avatars for the real estate and weapons lobby. They don't want someone who's a genuine populist who's genuinely anti-war and anti- genocide.
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