New York City Voters Reject Political Leftovers, Mamdani to Win Primary
“I can’t promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you,” he said.
New York Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s victory was a triumph over the influence of corporate money and the millions of dollars donated to super PACs by billionaires including former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Fix the City, a super PAC that supported Andrew Cuomo, raised $25 million and spent $20 million to defeat Mamdani.
Via The New York Times:
The national Democratic establishment on Tuesday night struggled to absorb the startling ascent of a democratic socialist in New York City who embraced a progressive economic agenda and diverged from the party’s dominant position on the Middle East.
As elections go, Tuesday’s party primary for mayor was a thunderbolt: New York voters turned away from a well-funded familiar face and famous name, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, and in doing so made a generational and ideological break with the party’s mainstream. They turned to a 33-year-old, three-term state assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani, who ran on an optimistic message about affordability and the rising cost of living that has eluded many national Democrats.
The former governor's loss marks the "biggest upset in modern NYC history," Trip Yang, a political strategist, told the BBC.
"A massive win for Zohran Mamdani that shows that when Donald Trump is President, New York Democrats want to see their leaders fight with enthusiasm and courage, and that's what Zohran showed voters."
The campaigns against him pulled no punches, making him look threatening in photos, accusing him of antisemitism, and red-baiting him over his association with the DSA. The Cuomo campaign was fined $756,994 for improperly coordinating with Fix the City over advertising.
Via the Guardian:
He has decried the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and championed the cause of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University who was released on Friday after more than three months detention on the orders of a federal judge.
Given the nature of his economically-focused campaign, wouldn’t it have been expedient to skirt around the issue of Gaza? .
“I have always been honest,” he says. “I am honest because I believe it is incumbent upon us to have a new kind of politics, consistent with international law, and I believe there are far more New Yorkers looking for that consistency than one would imagine.”
The solidarity of the billionaire class was evident in the New York Times editorial board, which broke from its promise not to endorse in local contests was so against him as to say he didn’t deserve a spot on the ballot. Wait! What? Isn’t the whole ‘deserve a spot thing’ something Russia and Iran use to screen candidates?
Mamdani’s showing in the first round of NYC’s ranked choice voting was so strong (44% of the vote in an eleven candidate contest) that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo conceded the primary last night.
"Tonight was not our night; tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani's night, and he put together a great campaign and he touched young people and inspired them and moved them and got them to come out and vote," Cuomo said at an event with supporters on Tuesday night. He said later, "Tonight is his night. He deserved it. He won. We're going to take a look and make some decisions."
You can bet there’s a lot of anxious consultants attached to mainstream Democrats, replaying the crap in their minds thrown at the winner, the sort of disparaging and vicious stuff that’s been part of politics as usual since Newt Gingrich elevated hate and division thirty years ago.
I expect the general election, where incumbent Mayor Eric Adams is running as an incumbent (who may be joined by Cuomo) could be mighty interesting. Assuming there are four candidates in that contest, the two of them –even though they are damaged goods– will split the vote for obviously sold out politicians.
The Democratic Party’s so-called moderate wing may be expected to bring even more billionaire bucks to the November election. They’ll still not be grasping the reasons why a minor league politician thought to be susceptible to the best smears money can buy, an avowed socialist, for christ’s sake, won and won big.
So here’s the deal. This victory wasn’t about ideology, political correctness, or his campaigning style. Mamdani said New Yorkers should have a better life, not the same old same old where a majority of the populace is living paycheck to paycheck, and that it was possible for the government to do great things by flipping the script on taxation.
He offered up hope in large measure and did it with a smile and handshake and a hug. He actually seemed to like the people part of the campaign. And a big part of his promise as a candidate was that he wasn’t willing to accept the political framing holding compromise with monsters/mobsters/madmen as the way things are done.
His social media presence was part of the reason Mamdani’s campaign ended up with 46,000 volunteers and attracted younger voters often disinterested in politics.
I can tell you now that the legacy media will try to make the NYC Mayoral contest into a trial by fire for socialism. Politico has already run an article about the failures of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who was backed by socialists when he defeated incumbent Lori Lightfoot two years ago.
The goal of the establishment will be to downplay that the alternative to Mamdani are politicians willing to accommodate rank inequality, racist/misogynist, theocrats, and authoritarians.
Sure, there are some Democrats who have been shown to have principles, but when you consider what the leadership of the party isn’t doing, they’re just voices in the wilderness. Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer is just now getting around to sending what may be a sternly worded letter about California Senator Alex Padilla being dragged out of a press conference for daring to ask a question.
This election should serve as a beacon of hope. We’ll need it, because in addition to the wall shit coming out of the Trump White House, we’re in for months of the same “common sense” Democrats who sold out the working class telling us Mamdani is a bad omen.
Elected Democrats should look at New York and…
Open. Their. Eyes.
Conservatives Are Already Losing Their Minds Over Mamdani’s Apparent Win by Julianne McShane at Mother Jones
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats and attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.
Stefanik, who has teased a potential run for governor of New York, called Mamdani “antisemitic, jihadist, Communist” in a post on her personal account on X, which has 1 million followers. (Mamdani has denied allegations of antisemitism and is not a Communist or jihadist, which refers to a Muslim extremist who supports terrorism.) Addressing her post to Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.), who did not endorse a candidate in the race, Stefanik wrote: “You own this dangerous insanity and are incapable of defeating it.”
Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and informal adviser to Trump who has described herself as a “proud Islamophobe,” fired off a torrent of baseless allegations about Mamdani to her 1.7 million followers on X. “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and [Mamdani] will be to blame,” Loomer wrote in one post. “New Yorkers forgot all about the victims of 9/11 killed by Muslims. Now a Muslim Communist will be the mayor of New York City. Get out while you can,” she wrote in another. “He is literally supported by terrorists,” Loomer baselessly claimed in a different post. “NYC is about to see 9/11 2.0” (The 9/11 attackers were members of the Islamic extremist terror group Al-Qaeda.)
A moral crusade against AI takes shape by Brian merchant at Blood in the Machine
By invoking Leo—about as radical an icon on the labor front as a pope can get, it seems—the new American Leo appears to be preparing to affix his legacy to addressing AI. And that’s at least in part because his predecessor, Pope Francis, had soured so deeply on Silicon Valley and big tech. Francis started out his term sanguine, embracing tech like Twitter and Snapchat and welcoming Valley honchos to the Vatican. But as the Valley’s excesses of became clearer—the mass slaughter of Rohingas in Myanmar, spurred on by viral Facebook posts that the company declined to address, seemed to be a tipping point—Francis outlook darkened accordingly, and he began calling for governments to step in.
In one meeting, Francis compared AI’s dependency on web content produced in a few languages—largely English—to the story of the Tower of Babel, in which overconfident humans, speaking a single tongue, attempted to build a tower to heaven, prompting God to scatter them and sabotage their creation.
During another meeting, the pope warned tech leaders against believing that they understood humans just because their data could predict human behavior: “You miss their humanity because you cannot reduce the human being to its data,” Father Salobir recalled…. Later that year, Francis warned of a “technological dictatorship” and called on governments to develop a legally binding international treaty to regulate AI.
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Iran Defies Trump on Nuclear Program by Shane Croucher at Newsweek
Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said his country will not abandon its nuclear program and that it must now rethink how to protect its facilities after strikes by Israel and the U.S.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Iran will never rebuild its nuclear facilities and that his country's strikes had caused them "monumental damage". He said the U.S. will not allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb.
Araghchi told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed the nuclear program was transparent and under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and that Iran had shown its commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty—but that still was not enough to protect it.
The top Iranian diplomat said the attacks will have "serious and profound effects on the course of the nuclear program," adding: "We need to rethink how we protect our nuclear facilities."
