The Strange Case of Zohran Mamdani, his media coverage, and why many elite Democrats agree with ... Donald Trump!?

 

I am fascinated by the process here, which reveals so much about the state of the Democratic Party, the rapidly increasing degradation of responsible media coverage, and ... oddly enough ... how The Jerusalem Post comes out as incredibly judicious on assessing Mamdani's comments about Jews and Palestinians.

All of this but the anti-semitism piece is pretty much encapsulated in one of the most condescending and yet simultaneously incoherent pieces I have ever read at The Hill:

Kurt Davis Jr is an insider's insider in the financial world, a member of both the Council for Foreign Relations and the Atlantic Council -- on of those modern-day solons speaking for the status quo in world and national economics as well as foreign policy -- a man coming from the tradition that it doesn't matter whether a Republican or Democrat is in the White House, both parties are expected to listen to the CFR.

Of course President Trump doesn't give a rat fuck what the CFR says, and -- it appears -- that's one of the few things he actually has in common with Zohran Mamdani. That might actually explain the confused tenor of Davis's article, about which the only positive thing I can say is that he avoids trotting out the antisemitism argument.

Davis begins by painting Mamdani as -- if you can believe it -- almost a direct left-wing copy of Donald Trump:

OK I could live with that in some ways, except that the next part of essay almost appears to have been written by a different author who hasn't read the lead-in. Here, Davis treats Mamdani as a typical populist with enticing rhetoric but no ability to govern, and effectively predicts failure for him because of that:

Uh, wait a minute here, Mr Council for Foreign Relations. One minute ago you were comparing him to Donald Trump in terms of being a populist, and now you're playing the traditional "radical populists don't know how to govern and therefore usually fail" card.

Did you either forget or somehow miss the fact that President Trump has never provided safety, stability, or a balanced budget to the entire country, and has in fact plunged it (twice!) into nightmarish messes, while managing to win two (and nearly three) presidential elections while failing to govern?

In other words, are you so focused on CFR propaganda that you forgot to notice that your first example precludes your second?

Davis then doubles down again on his "competence in governance" theme, then pays lip service to American dissatisfaction with the existing system while warning those dissatisfied Americans that they cannot have meaningful change ... unless the billionaires approve:

The truly amazing part is that Mr Davis's illogic and paternalistic disregard for Mamdani is literally the response of the day on the Democratic side of the spectrum. If anything, many of the old-line Democratic elites are even more brutal. Take, for example, the interview that Democratic pollster and former Clinton adviser Mark Penn gave to Fox.

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If Mamdani is in fact "the most extreme major candidate ever to win such a major office" (and the only office he has actually won is a term as New York Assemblyman), this would literally mean that 

(a) Mr Penn believes that Mr Mamdani is more extreme than Donald Trump (who, we recall, has actually become President twice), and 

(b) that we have to wonder where exactly Mr Penn locates US Senator Bernie Sanders, who is also a Democratic Socialist and a Jew who has endorses Mr Mamdani, or even 

(c) if Mr Penn actually knows enough American history to realize that the Democrats once nominated Senator George McGovern for President, way back in 1972, whose proposed economic program for the nation with its Guaranteed Annual Income went quite a few bridges past Mr Mamdani.

In other words, Mr Penn is acting less like an elite Democratic campaign adviser than some old guy put out to pasture who's mumbling into his gin tonic with the same sort of unintelligibility as James Carville these days.

Even leaving that aside, why SHOULDN'T we make this about "Mamdani versus Trump," since our old-line Democrats have not been winning against Mr Trump? Mamdani is young, photogenic, fast on his feet, and at least he FUCKING SOUNDS LIKE HE WANTS TO FIGHT.

Penn, meanwhile, is so deluded that he thinks Andrew Cuomo could come back and beat Mamdani in the general election after having been humiliated in the primary:

Sadly, Mr Penn, even the best poll that Mr Cuomo could buy for himself disagrees -- giving him only a 50-50 shot at beating Mamdani in the general election -- and you need to take this one with a very large grain of rock salt:

In case you wondered (I did) that photo of Cuomo and family does appear not to be the actual people, but their likenesses as preserved in the New York City Wax Museum of Failed and Disgraced Politicans Who Never Knew When It Was Over For Them ...

Meanwhile, headlines like this from The Independent continue to run, insisting that to support Mamdani risks alienating "top Democratic donors," who haven't been supporting him this far:

Of course the problem with this is that it's pure Clickbait, and in the entire article of may 1,500 words, here are the only words that actually discuss "top Democratic donors":

Two "unnamed donors" that The Independent's reporters didn't even interview, but are merely copying from The Hill. But in an egregious act of journalistic malpractice, The Independent changes the context of the two "donor" quotes.

As they originally appeared in The Hill, these quotes were about general giving to the Democratic Party, and neither quote was explicitly tied to Mamdani alone, which the first paragraph below makes clear:

Note the use of "increasingly alarmed about the state of the Democratic Party" rather than "increasingly alarmed about the Mamdani campaign."

Meanwhile, let's go back to the "Mamdani is an antisemite" talking point. Various American corporate media outlets have cherry-picked this or that quotation to either support or deny charges of antisemitism.

But only the conservative Jerusalem Post has actually done the world the service of laying it all out there in about a 98% objective manner:

The JP literally runs down, topic by topic, every comment Zohran Mamdani has made on the record about Jews and Israel. While there are a couple of asides (but only a couple), what the JP does that is refreshing is just present that material ... and stop.

The article doesn't tell you what to conclude. It just puts the material out there.

You need to read the entire article, because I cannot find one that does it better in capturing the complexities and ambiguities of that record. Here is a single example:

One of the comments on this story is the very first, by the way, that I have seen which also explicitly captures the position of many non-Jewish Americans on this issue:

"He is clearly pro Palestinian rights but in [to] many in the U.S.'s eyes its not a zero sum game." THAT is an amazing observation ... so why do we have to hear it only from a commenter at the Jerusalem Post?

This is not so much a post about Zohran Mamdani himself, as it is about how the media is processing the story. I choose the word "processing" with some care, as "covering" implies straight reporting, and that is literally no longer what national media does -- left or right.

For example, as The Independent repurposing of the quotes from The Hill, an awful lot of coverage is not from any sort of active journalism, but rather the recycling of quotes from interviews that have already appeared in other sources. Each time this happens, however, a subtly different spin is put on the same words lifted for the story you happen to be reading.

If that seems a lot like the old "telephone game" you used to play in first or second grade, it's because you are paying attention.

So who is Zohran Mamdani -- and would YOU think he's, for example, antisemitic or not? How would you find out? Probably by watching the entire Mamdani - Andrew Cuomo debate, which is easily available here, but the downside is that ... it's  2 1/2 hours long.

So do you want others to pick the highlights for you that tell you what to think about him, or are you going to invest the time yourself?

If you live in NYC and plan to vote, then I'd strongly suggest watching the video.

If you are a Democrat who doesn't live in NYC, but wants to understand the implications for Mamdani/Bernie/AOC for the future of the Democratic Party, then I guess you're going to have to decide for yourself how much to watch.

Just remember: you can no longer trust corporate media to help you with this kind of decision.

Corporate media asks only one (Jewish) Republican about "Shylock" in the ongoing process of normalizing MAGA

 This is my Google News feed for President Trump's use of "shylock" in a speech the other day:

In addition, I looked at twenty-two other major media sources, domestic and international, and I discovered two key items about the coverage:

ONE: With the exception of Mediate askng Jewish GOP Representative David Kustoff about it, there is no evidence that ANY reporter for any corporate media posed this question to any Republican leader. One suspects that some reporters already knew they wouldn't get a real answer, because no Republican politician in his, her, or their right mind would criticize The Boss. They are probably correct, but let's look at it from a different perspective: this means that the corporate media has effectively (and more or less permanently) surrendered on the issue of holding President Trump accountable for what he says that is racist, sexist, etc. IF the ADL and the Jewish Telegraph Agency and others had not pushed back, there would have been no story.

Even allowing for President Trump's many other anti-semitic references.

For the sake of completeness and the vicarious enjoyment of watching someone justifiably twisting in the wind, here was Kustoff's reply and rejoinder with Mediate:

So this apparently means that the Republican standard is that if I claim I did not know that n*gger, ch*nk, ret*rd, or c*nt were slurs, I get to keep using them until somebody complains.

Got it.

TWO: President Trump never apologized for using the term. You'd almost miss that because nearly every single media focuses on his patently transparently lying denial:

No apology. No "If I'd known it mean that I'd obvious never have used the word" or "I'm sorry if my ignorance of the real meaning of the term upset anyone."

This is, of course, par for the course for authoritarian leaders: they can never be wrong, and they never apologize. "You view it differently" is as good as it gets.

By the way, how do I know the President is lying when he says he never heard of it?

Because Trump's official campaign Twitter/X account brought it up during the 2020 election that Joe Biden had also used the term in 2014:

And, of course, to those who view the President's relationship with Judaism, Jews, and Israel as purely transactional, it doesn't matter, as this rare moment of truth shows:

In Podhoretz's mind, as long as the President bombs Iran he can also sit down to dinner with Ye seven days a week, and pardon insurrectionists wearing pro-Auschwitz t-shirts as often as he wants.

Strangely -- or perhaps not so strangely -- the same media that did not question Republicans about the issue did not mention anywhere that President Trump never apologized.

This is what I mean about normalizing the Trump administration -- more and more each day the corporate media covers the stories the way MAGA wants them to be covered.

An final probative example: recently, the New York Times permitted an anonymous author to publish a hit-piece on Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic NYC mayoral candidate. Aside from the anonymity of the author, the Times permitted publication of hacked material about Mamdani's college application which is decidedly odd from a newspaper that previously -- and piously -- refused to print a story derived from hacked records about Donald Trump.

The double standard, as Newsweek reports, is palpable and longstanding:

The Times' only pathetic defense of this was that they didn't do the hacking, wouldn't do such a thing -- but that they would print the results when somebody else did the things they wouldn't do, and that they would cover up the identity of the author who is, as noted above, "an admitted race scientist/eugenicist" in order to give their readers ... "more context" ... about Zohran Mamdani:

It's becoming pretty clear that we might as well merge the New York Times with the New York Post. The Post, at least, doesn't try to disguise its ideological leanings.

That's where we are today with respect to the corporate media ...

If you know a service member, listen to their fears ... but send them to the GI Rights Hotline instead of giving advice

 

According to TruthOut, calls to the GI Rights Hotline spiked by 94% in June 2025 over the previous year, driven primarily by fears of a politicized military being put into action against American citizens.

From the story:

“Overall callers have shared serious concerns that the president is moving the country away from a representative democracy altogether,” [Hotline counselor Steve] Woolford told Truthout in an email. “These callers believe that the military will determine what the United States becomes by deciding which side to follow. For them, having service members refuse to turn their backs on the constitution is the safeguard against martial law and dictatorship.” …

U.S. Air Force airman Juan Bettancourt said his colleagues in the armed forces have expressed similar concerns. Bettancourt is expressing his own views and not speaking on behalf of the military or the Department of Defense.

“They are absolutely petrified of being put in a position in which they are the vehicle to advance further authoritarianism, and the proto-fascism that we’re seeing,” Bettancourt told Truthout. “There is absolutely that fear that they’re going to be the pawns in this chess game that brings about the further expansion of authoritarianism.”

Bettancourt said some service members fear the military will become Trump’s domestic police force, potentially in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. He says this is a particularly fraught prospect for Latino personnel, who could be deployed to carry out Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Thousands of immigrants enlist in the military each year. In fiscal year 2024, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services naturalized more than 16,000 service members — a 34 percent increase from the previous year. Of those naturalized between fiscal years 2020 and 2024, the top five countries of origin were the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, and Ghana.

“They feel they’re betraying themselves,” said Bettancourt, himself an immigrant from Colombia.

Here's the graphic with the number for the GI Rights Hotline, but you really need to visit the page for full information:

If you know someone on active duty or in the reserve components, and they are expressing reservations about the current administration's use of troops on American soil and what they should do about it if bothered by their conscience, here are three pieces of advice I feel quite confidant in giving:

ONE: Listen rather than talk, and keep your mouth shut about anything you hear. It's great that a service member trusts you enough to tell you about their doubts and fears, and possibly even actions they may be thinking about taking in acting on those doubts and fears, BUT ...

... you have know idea how talking to ANYBODY else can potentially get that service member into a whole world of hurt.

TWO: If they ask you for advice -- and my answer here is the same for you if you are a veteran or know nothing about the military at all -- here's what you do: Tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline. These folks (and their attorneys) are TRAINED to know what they can and cannot say, and how to give service members legally sound advice on what to do next. DO NOT GIVE THEM ADVICE OFF THE TOP OF YOUR HEAD, or tell them something you read on the internet. I say again: tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline.

THREE: Forget you ever had this conversation unless the service member voluntarily comes back to you again. I know that in some ways this is just a restatement of Item #1, but let's be really clear here: there are dozens of ways that things you say about them, or to them, can get them into deep shit, and I don't care if you are a parent, sibling, spouse, pastor, therapist, or even a civilian attorney, you do not know enough of about those dozens of ways to get into trouble to give them advice.

Tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline.

I know this is unsatisfying and you WANT to help them.

I don't care. I have worked, inside the military, with issues like this, and "My Dad told me I should ..." or "My girlfriend thinks I need to ..." or even "A veteran told me the way to do it is ..." ARE ALWAYS TROUBLE for the service member.

Tell them to call 1-877-447-4487 and speak to a counselor at the GI Rights Hotline.

Please.

It isn't just US Tent: here are the contractors building Alligator Auschwitz -- and their contact info

Do you believe in public accountability?

Then here is the list, courtesy of the Tampa Bay Times (I added the contact information)

CDR Maguire and its affiliated company, CDR Health

Doodie Calls

Garda World

Garner Environmental Services

Gothams LLC

Granny's Alliance

Longview International Technology Solutions

US Tent Rental

PLEASE use contact information responsibly to register your disapproval of the company's involvement, to spread this information to other people involved in resisting mass deportation, to any mutual funds or retirement funds that might want to divest themselves of these companies ...

PLEASE DO NOT dox any individuals, send threats, or perform any illegal activities with this FREELY AVAILABLE INFORMATION gleaned from their PUBLIC WEBSITES.

The Delmarva Times: A case study in the local cultivation of extremism and the appetite for mass murder

 

In Delaware, despite being among the bluest of blue states, we have had our experiences with the active cultivation of a far right population that uses increasingly violent and even exterminationist rhetoric.

Certainly the Delaware Republican Party has done its bit for pushing politics as hard to the right as possible, which is exceptionally odd given that the long tradition of the First State's GOP had long been one of bipartisan centrism under the likes of Governor and later US Representative Mike Castle.

But in 2010 Castle lost his US Senate primary to upstart right-winger Christine O'Donnell, whose most famous moments came from (believe it or not) denying she was a witch and demanding in a debate with her Democratic opponent, "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" (She lost in a landslide to Chris Coons.

The DE GOP has gone down hill so fast that large Democratic majorities control both houses of the General Assembly, and the Democratic primary for Governor, Mayor of Wilmington, and about half of the seats in the General Assembly effectively IS the election. They have so badly lost that one GOP State Representative wrote a highly publicized editorial bemoaning the "tyranny of the majority" that has blighted the state with "one-party rule" through the horrible mechanism of ... Democrats winning elections:

Elections have consequences, and the choices made by individual voters over years have created a monoculture of thought and action in the state Legislature. Delaware House and Senate Democrats can already pass any bill requiring a simple majority vote, without the need for any participation by Republican lawmakers. As a result, too many such bills fail to incorporate any perspective not shared by the majority.

Then this year there was the rather bizarre stunt of inviting the GOP poster girl for transphobic hate, Representative Nancy "Tranny, tranny, tranny" Mace, to visit Delaware and spew her hate about Representative Sarah McBride, the first-ever openly transgender Congresswoman, and one of Delaware's most popular politicians.

They've been reduced to running increasingly fringe candidates in a handful of safe districts, and by mimicking what has worked for Republicans nationwide: creating a network of bogus organizations (the Caesar Rodney Institute, the Delaware Women's Self Defense Association, and others) and developing an alternative hard-right media presence. 

This media presence was built off the audience for some pre-existing right-wing talk shows (WMDT, etc.). We now have one statewide news site controlled by a conservative grocery chain owner, another regional paper owned by a GOP legislator, and ever-the-right-wing-upstart First State Update, literally produced by an incel in his basement (but people patronize it because he monitors police bands and usually manages to beat everybody online with reports of major traffic accidents or shootings). Given that we have no TV station in Delaware and our state "newspaper of record" is a Gannett publication, what sounds like a dribble of hard-core MAGA is actually much more.

Because we generally live in a world where national news -- even on the far right -- is dominated by a handful of major corporate players, we don't usually consider the impact of these local wannabes. Instead we talk about Fox News, One America, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Signal, the Daily Wire, etc.

But I am increasingly becoming aware, as we listen to MAGA voters clamoring for ever more brutal behavior by the Trump regime, that we've missed a critical point here. These local far-right "news" sources are the first-line breeding ground for extremism.

Take The Delmarva Times, for example, which aspires to be "your premier destination for comprehensive news coverage of the Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset regions, as well as broader state-level developments in Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia," and "to provide timely, accurate, and insightful journalism that serves the diverse communities of the Delmarva Peninsula."

An end to denial: President Trump and MAGA are serious about everything up to, and including, genocide ... here are the receipts

 

Here's my conundrum: How does Dr. Aviva Dautch, the Director and publisher of Jewish Renaissance, the leading Jewish arts magazine in the UK, understand what's happening here from across the Atlantic Ocean when tens of millions of people here who are not MAGA seem not to get it?

Also in the UK, George Orwell -- who has been fucking DEAD for 75 years -- still gets it from the grave: "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Meanwhile, what do we have over here? This Newsweek headline from June 8 pretty much sums it up: "75 Democrats Express 'Gratitude' to ICE in Antisemitism Vote Amid LA Riots." Some day in the far future an alien cultural anthropologist examining the ruins of Earth, will turn one of she/he/it's heads toward a colleague and remark, "They had a term for this. They called it 'Stockholm Syndrome.' They just couldn't recognize it when it was happening, apparently."

It's particularly fascinating to find Jewish writers like Jeffrey Salkin just two days ago ("Not Every Struggle Requires a Nazi Metaphor," July 1, 2025) adamantly condemning the use of Nazi and Holocaust "metaphors" from some sort of bizarre moral high horse ridden without the slightest understanding that we are not now creating metaphors but MAKING DIRECT HISTORICAL COMPARISONS.

Here are two of Salkin's dumbest observations: