Liars Beware

Propaganda is inevitable but failure is impossible

Library of Congress.

I already did my Mamdani victory post and, who knows, maybe you don’t want another one. Or maybe you do! Because among non-fascists I see a lot of excited interest in a campaign that’s still more than four months from conclusion, and in which most of the excitees do not have a direct stake.

Or do they? (We, I mean.) I’ve seen joyful social media posts from all over the country, and attaboys from foreign news orgs, since the news came down. Over and over I hear that this is good news in a sea of bad, the first time the writer has felt positive in months or years, and so on. A lot of people don’t want to let the moment go, perhaps knowing that the hard slog of a campaign ahead will bring static and negative impacts and hoping a nice hot soak in optimism might condition them against that.

The negging has already begun, of course. The New York fucking Times is doing what it can to strangle the campaign. From “As Donors Work Against Mamdani, Top Democrats Stop Short of Backing Him”:

In an interview, Scott Rechler, one of the city’s biggest landlords [bet they’ve got him on speed-dial - ed.] said that in a general election race between Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist, and Mr. Adams, he would put his support and potentially his financial resources behind the scandal-tarred incumbent.

Mr. Rechler, who donated $250,000 to a super PAC supporting Mr. Cuomo, expressed hope that the former governor and Mr. Adams, who is running in the general election as an independent, would not split the centrist vote.

“You want to have leadership that speaks to what New York is,” Mr. Rechler said. “It’s the capital of capitalism.”

Consider for a moment this parfait of delusion: First, the notion (apparently shared by the Times) that this rich asshole needs to go beyond his usual silent sabotage of democracy and explain why he’s doing it like some comic book villain; next, that the cat’s-paw of his sabotage should be the disgraced and widely hated Mayor Showboat; and last, that ordinary people struggling to live, work, and keep their dreams alive in a great but overpriced city need no direct assistance or even sympathy, but only the mere assurance that their sweat and toil are keeping the lights glowing on the giant “capital of capitalism” sign and pricks like him happy.

There are also the more viscerally crackpot rightwing takes (He’s communist! Islamist! SHARIA!) that have proliferated and will persist through the campaign and after — just as they did during Bill de Blasio’s campaigns and through his two full stop-and-search-ending, crime-dropping terms, denying objective reality and promoting the vilest racism. That’s rightwing SOP by now; as my reporting over years has shown, the garbage that used to be the province of fringe figures on the Right has become the provender of their major media, and they churn it night and day.

But it’s the Prestige Press, and the rich pigs for whom they cape, that you really have to watch out for. It’s true the out racist loons will never stop trying to stir the latent racism in normal white Americans and will in some cases succeed. But while most of their targets have been trained over decades to at least feel bad about racism, if not to abandon it, far fewer of them ever learned the necessary second lesson — that the real danger comes not from minorities and immigrants, but from the rich. And armies of PR men are devoted to preventing them from ever learning it.

So I can predict this with some certainty: Down the line you, and your less-well-briefed friends and relations, will hear all kinds of bullshit about the impracticability of Mamdani’s plans; about how on that account he will inevitably disappoint his followers (and expressions of sympathy for them on that account); that there will be “unintended consequences” to his policies that will actually hurt the people he professes to help; and that, while it is de trop to call him an Islamist, there are a lot of millionaires and billionaires, on the reporters’ speed-dial and adhering to the Jewish faith, who say they are frightened of what some keffiyeh-happy Columbia student might do to them in a dark alley.

You get a hint of why that is from this bit that must have been approved while the Times senior editors were in the bathroom doing blow:

“I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 [donation] for Cuomo for real enthusiasm,” [investor Mark] Gorton said in an interview. “It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sort of things were not useful things to do.”

The bad thing about this is that they have nearly limitless resources and no shame. The good thing is it won’t work.

I mean it won’t work to stop Mamdani from election. Other forces may stop him; the rich fucks may flood the streets with so much money and do so much voter suppression that they choke off his vote and get Adams or the lunatic Sliwa in. (Hell, they may shoot or kidnap Mamdani — this is America 2025, after all.) But, trust me, New Yorkers are not going to be swayed by New York Post MAM-COMMIE! headlines (“chortle, gotta love the Post” go fuck yourself) or even by Prestige Press thumbsuckers. They’re not like most Americans, in other words, and that’s a lot of why I love them.

What our opponents, overt and covert, may do, though — but only if you let them — is crush that joy and relief that you felt when you learned that a decent, civic-minded, and serious candidate had defeated the creeps and had a better-than-even chance to win and run New York City. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if killing your hope were not their primary goal.

Things may work out, or they may not, but my advice is: On no account let them take your hope from you — especially not on the grounds that having hope may leave you disappointed, because we are neither children nor emotionally disabled and we know that while not every campaign is a success, failure is impossible. Then you may keep the feeling you felt on Tuesday through the trials to come, and maybe all the days of your life.