It's Mamdani Time

Even the fascists know it

© 2024 Bingjeifu He, used under a Creative Commons license

Two weeks out, I don’t see how the oligarchs and their media stooges stop Zohran Mamdani. I rather doubt the oligarchs and stooges see how, either. However, for such as they, attacks on high-profile blue-state Democrats — for that’s what Mamdani is, and how he appears on the ballot* — can still be worthwhile, even if these attacks have no hope of electoral impact, because they send a message to rubes outside the jurisdiction about what is acceptable and unacceptable in America politics, even when what they portray as unacceptable is actually quite popular.

It should be mentioned that part of Mamdani’s success is his willingness to champion policies the voters actually want instead of making up excuses for why they can’t have them. Cheaper housing, lower cost of living, higher minimum wage — those are all easy layups. Even his promise to protect people from ICE goons reflects a growing consensus across the country at large.

These policies are reflexively treated by the Prestige Press as outside the mainstream, but if they are, it’s because those guys put them there, not because voters don’t want them.

Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post is still putting up a brave front, pushing for Republican Curtis Sliwa to quit the race so Cuomo can pick up his votes: “Mamdani is poised to win and do major, deadly damage to the lives of all New Yorkers: He must be stopped,” they cry [hysterical emphasis in the orginal]. “It stinks, but for the sake of the city you love so deeply, Curtis, please swallow this bitter pill.” It must kill them that their cause relies on the only Republican in America who can’t be bribed.

In its passive-aggressive way the New York Times is also pitching in, and their latest champion is Bret Stephens, who tells us “Why Mamdani Frightens Jews Like Me.” “’Like Me’ — you mean assholes?” one is tempted to rejoin. Stephens admits that “38 percent of Jewish New Yorkers intend to vote for Zohran Mamdani” and, while he restrains himself (or an editor restrains Stephens) from calling them all self-hating, he nonetheless hints as much, calling the candidate “a longtime anti-Zionist of a peculiarly obsessed sort,” and adding that “one of the ways anti-Zionists” such as Mamdani “tend to give themselves away as something darker is that the only human-rights abuses they seem to notice are Israel’s…”

I suppose we could take it as progress that Stephens even implies that Israel commits human-rights abuses, but voters who’ve been watching Israel bomb hospitals and schools and shoot children and journalists for two years may tend to tune out. One senses even Stephens knows that, and when he tries to connect Mamdani to the guy who shot two people at the DC Jewish Museum (because he yelled “Free Palestine”) and says “thousands of antisemitic incidents nationwide since the Oct. 7 attacks also have had at least a patina of anti-Zionism,” we can hear the scratching of his nails on the bottom of the barrel.

The Washington Times, on the other hand, faces defeat square in the face, and shows admirable awareness of its mission in such cases: to salvage propaganda victory from electoral defeat. The very title of their man in the street story, “New Yorkers not worried about Mamdani’s socialist ideology,” shows the way: Sure, this evil Mooslim is set to win, but that just shows how evil, Mooslim or not, New Yorkers are, and by evil we mean socialist. The lede is even better:

Democratic voters in America’s largest city are ready to elect socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor because they think socialism and communism have gotten a bad rap but are now the future of both their city and their party.

This is not based on any poll result, but on reporter Kerry Picket’s tendentious reading of observations by three (3) New Yorkers. First among these:

“I think he has strong ethics. When he speaks, he seems to speak from the heart. I think he is thinking very hard about what he’s saying,” said Corey Griswold, 43, a transgender New York City public school teacher.

A transgender! And they let himher teach school! No wonder they’re all communiss, and vice versa. As to the other two subjects, one goes to college and the other works for a college, and so may be dismissed as eggheads.

To make up for the paucity of interviews, Picket lards in lengthy implications of antisemitism, and also what her editors must consider damning bits like “Mamdani has called for ‘seizing the means of production’ and said ‘I don’t think we should have billionaires.’” At least these might seem damning if you even know where the former comes form, as I doubt 95% of WashTimes readers do, or think the latter means that Bill Gates’ and Elon Musk’s money should just evaporate and we should all live in mud huts.

The three interview subjects don’t seem to take the imputations of communism seriously — Picket says they “demurred” when asked about it, though their attitude seems to me closer to What About It. But I find interesting that the paper left this as the last word:

“We’ve got cops on the street stealing people and throwing them in the back of vans right now. There are people who, just because they look a certain way, are disappeared and thrown into countries they’re not from,” the transgender teacher said.

“I’m sorry that sounds a lot like communism to me. We have gulags. We have prisons where we’re just people go without trials, without anything, without no wrongdoing, like we’re already here.”

Maybe their journalistic instinct to close with a neat button overpowered their propaganda instincts. Or maybe they realize that Mamdani’s impending victory means that, instead of telling everyone he’s a communist Jew-killer, they’re going to have to engage the point of view that’s about to elect him.

* No, I haven’t forgotten the Working Families Party line!